The Debian Installer project are pleased to announce an alpha version of the new Debian-Installer project which is the actively developed replacement for the much maligned boot-floppies installer. This initial alpha is only available for i386, as although ports to other architectures are progressing well, the team feels they are too immature to be released as alphas at this time. The installer is able to provide a useable Debian system however this is only alpha quality and so the usual disclaimers apply. Special attention would be appreciated on CDROM installations and on IDE hardware.

Nearly all user interaction in debian-installer is through debconf (cdebconf in particular) and although d-i currently ships with a simple textual based interface switching this for gtk/slang/dialog/automated frontends will be relatively easy.