Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 1 Released

Debian 11 "Bullseye" isn't expected to be released until well into 2021 but out today is the first alpha release of the Debian Installer that will ultimately power that next major Debian GNU/Linux release.

This is just the first of many alpha releases today of the Debian Installer and not of the Debian Bullseye itself. Bullseye continues to serve as the Debian testing and many changes have been landing in the months since the Debian 10 "Buster" release.

Among the changes to find with the Debian Installer Bullseye Alpha 1 are:

- Finally replacing "CD" / "CD-ROM" language with "installation media" to reflect the fact many Debian users are not installing via CD (or even DVD) with many USB flash drive based installations, network booting, and other means to install Debian besides traditional CDs.

- Updated Debian mirror lists.

- The graphics payload will be kept for sub-menus with the Debian Installer to help with unreadable fonts on HiDPI displays on EFI systems.

- GRUB2 has added the probe module to signed UEFI images.

- New hardware support for the Olimex A20-OLinuXino-Lime2-eMMC target, OLPC AP-SP keyboard support, VirtIO-GPU support for graphical output in VM instances, and backports for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3.

- Virtualization-related packages are now automatically installed when virtualization is detected.

- Support for EFI netboot on the Arm mini.iso image.

More details on the Debian Installer first alpha for Debian Bullseye via the mailing list announcement.