14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian Project, through Cyril Brulebois, has announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the fourth Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Stretch" installer.
According to the announcement, Debian 9 "Stretch" Installer Alpha 4 drops support for CD sets, as reported by Softpedia last month, when the Debian Project said that they would no longer offer CD-size ISO images for the GNU/Linux operating system.
This move was quite necessary, considering the fact that maintaining more than 8 CD-size ISO images per supported hardware architecture was quite a huge effort, not to mention that more and more people no longer download them.
Most of the CD#1 alternatives have also been removed because the Debian Installer now allows users to choose a desktop environment during the installation process. However, the Xfce CD#1 image is still available as a single-CD desktop system.
"The Debian Installer team is pleased to announce the fourth Alpha release of the installer for Debian 9 'Stretch,'" said Cyril Brulebois. "Full CD sets were removed, as announced earlier in the Summary of the Debian CD BoF at DebConf15."
Improvements in Debian 9 "Stretch" Installer Alpha 4
Among the things that have been enhanced in the fourth Alpha build of the upcoming Debian 9 "Stretch" installer, we can mention that the at-spi2-atk, at-spi2-core, finish-install, debian-installer, netcfg, os-prober, preseed, util-linux, and zipl-installer packages have been updated to their latest version available.
The hardware support in the Debian 9.0 "Stretch" installer has been improved as well, with the addition of new versions for the flash-kernel, u-boot, and Linux kernel packages, which now have support for qca6164 in ath10k, build EXt4 as a module for MIPS, and enable various variables.
If you want to take the fourth Alpha milestone of the forthcoming Debian 9.0 installer for a test drive, you can download Debian 9 "Stretch" Installer Alpha 4 right now from Softpedia, just please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.