14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian team has revealed that the third Alpha for Debian 9 "Stretch" has been released and is now ready for download and testing.
The Debian installer might not seem like the most exciting piece of software, but this is where things are happening for the operating system. Before developers push a Live CD out the door, with the latest improvements, they first make them available through this installer. As you can imagine, this is not really aimed at regular users, but it's a good way to see what is happening with the upcoming version.
The rate of Debian releases has been increasing, and it looks like the devs are becoming much more efficient. It still takes a long time before two concurrent releases are offered, but it is significantly less than it used to be. This can only be good news for its users and other projects that are based on this operating system.
Debian 9 "Stretch" is coming along
Previous releases of Debian brought some important stuff, like a major kernel update, but now we get some UEFI changes and improvements, along with some modifications regarding the default packages.
"Priorities were updated for a number of packages, which leads to a different package set being installed by default. Fixed non-preseeded Encrypted LVM installs, and worked around issues with gcc 5 leading to unbootable mini.iso images," reads the official announcement.
According to the changelog, a beep has been added to the UEFI x86 boot menu, the 's' shortcut has been added (for speech synthesis) to the UEFI x86 boot menu, ifcpu64.c32 has been added for 64-bit detection, and the menus have been modified as well, Linux USB net drivers are no longer looked for under drivers/USB, and a few other changes have been made as well.
As always, you can download the Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 3 from Softpedia.