Debian 10 Buster's Installer Reaches RC Phase - Finally Offers Secure Boot Support

While there are around 150 release critical bugs to be addressed before Debian 10.0 "Buster" can make its debut, the Debian Installer continues getting in great shape and is out today with its release candidate.

Debian Installer Buster RC1 is now available for testing as the first release candidate of the installer for this next major Debian GNU/Linux release. Most notable with today's RC1 release is finally having UEFI Secure Boot support in place for x86_64 (amd64) architecture. This will allow Debian to finally work out-of-the-box on SecureBoot-protected PCs after Debian 9 "Stretch" failed to get Secure Boot in order and thus Debian has been without this UEFI-based "security" feature until now.

Debian is the last major Linux distribution picking up Secure Boot support but at least it's now in order for the big 10.0 milestone. The Debian Installer Buster RC1 release also now changes cryptsetup to default to LUKS2 for the on-disk format version, updates to the latest Linux 4.19 kernel point release, more error detection for GRUB2, dark theme mode improvements, support for additional Arm boards, and various fixes.

On the Arm front there is now images for the Novena and Banana Pi M2 Berry boards and machine DB entries for the Raspberry Pi SBCs, Rock64, Pine A64 LTS, and others.

Also notable with this release is VirtIO-GPU being added to the Debian Installer for getting better graphics support when running Debian Buster within KVM/QEMU.

This installer release candidate can be obtained from Debian.org.