Linux kernel 4.3 is now supported by the Debian Installer

Jan 11, 2016 01:17 GMT  ·  By

The Debian Installer team, through Cyril Brulebois, has been proud to announce earlier, January 10, that the fifth Alpha release of the upcoming installer for Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Stretch" is now available for testing.

From the changelog, it seems to us that the Debian developers responsible for the installer have put a lot of effort into this new Alpha build of the Debian Stretch installer, which now features support for NVMe devices, experimental support for the SPARC64 hardware architecture, and installer images for QNAP TS-x09.

The 32-bit support has been updated as well so that the installer will work only on i686 machines from now on instead of i586. Moreover, accessibility has been enabled for all desktops, it is now possible to display or hide the characters typed in the password fields, and there's also the ability to adjust the size of the fonts.

Additionally, the proposed-updates support has been updated to handle file:// URLs, not only http:// and ftp://, there's better support for Perl 5.22, the module-init-tools build dependency has been replaced with a kmod one, DT-based machines are now better supported, and the default wireless security type has been changed to WPA.

Support for Linux kernel 4.3

But wait, that's not all, as now the Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Stretch" Alpha 5 installer no longer supports that deprecated Linux 4.2 kernel, even though it is currently maintained by Canonical for one more year or so, and introduces support for Linux kernel 4.3, for which the Debian Installer team has added numerous useful modules.

In addition to all of the above, the fifth Alpha build of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Stretch" installer includes support for GPT and MS-DOS partition tables, adds Kirkwood mapping for the Iomega iConnect dtb, as well as multiple improvements to u-boot. You can download the Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 "Stretch" Alpha 5 installer right now via our website.