Cyril Brulebois has announced the release candidate for the Debian 13 (Trixie) installer. The release includes improvements in the base-installer, debian-cd, grub-installer, espeakup, gnupg2, grub-installer, grub-installer-utils, haveged, ethdetect, netcfg, partman-auto, partman-base, partman-efi, partman-partitioning, partman-xfs, rescue, systemd-udeb, tzsetup, user-setup, hardware support, and localization status.

The base-installer now excludes *-signed-template packages from kernel selection, while debian-cd improves source package management and updates the Debian-edu-full task file. The kernel ABI is bumped to 6.12.27, and support for win32-loader is dropped. The list of devices supported by the firmware-sof-signed firmware package is updated, and the list of devices supported by the firmware-sof-signed firmware package is updated.

Debian Installer Trixie RC 1

The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the first release candidate of the installer for Debian 13 "Trixie".

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Foreword

Cyril would like to dedicate this release to his dad, Gérard Brûlebois, the nicest and kindest man one could ever dream of.

Improvements in this release

* base-installer:
- Exclude *-signed-template packages from kernel selection (#1104907).
* debian-cd:
- Improve source package management.
- Update Debian-edu-full task file (#1079261).
- Don't include large graphics firmware packages on armhf builds.
- Exclude some firmware packages, either globally or on a per-arch
basis, e.g. if they're not expected to be useful within the
installer, without non-free components, and/or with the current
Linux kernel configuration options.
- Update the list of devices supported by the firmware-sof-signed
firmware package, which fixes speech synthesis on some hardware.
* debian-installer:
- [arm64] Increase SD card image sizes for netboot (150MB → 300MB)
and netboot-gtk (200MB → 400MB).
- Bump Linux kernel ABI to 6.12.27.
- Drop support for win32-loader.
- Add initial support for the Ceratopsian theme (Debian 13).
* debian-installer-utils:
- Recognize persistent memory block devices (#879106).
* debootstrap:
- Do not pull in usr-is-merged in trixie/sid (#1091649).
* espeakup:
- Fix input when the installer starts.
* gnupg2:
- gpgv: Avoid dependencies on npth and libassuan (#1102621).
* grub-installer:
- Fix wrong or empty bootdev value for grub-pc (#1035096, #1058638).
- When installing a grub-efi* package and when efibootmgr is
available, use it to dump the bootloader configuration, for
debugging purposes (#931917).
- Fix some grub-installer/os-prober quirks (#1035085):
+ Fix inverted supported/unsupported OS logic in expert mode.
+ Mark efi, macosx, and minix os-prober types as supported.
+ Don't enable os-prober when there's not a single supported OS.
+ Only ask about os-prober once.
- Remove grub-legacy support (#1086750, #1086840).
- Skip grub-installer on non-EFI armhf (#1091441).
* haveged:
- Ensure /dev/shm's presence, otherwise the daemon exits early.
* hw-detect:
- Install spice-vdagent under QEMU/KVM if we are installing a
desktop, i.e. if xserver-xorg-core or task-desktop are installed
(#986500).
- Ignore renesas_usb_fw.mem requested by xhci-pci-renesas when falling
back to the ROM. Devices might already work at this point, and a
reload would risk making them disappear all of a sudden. This can
catastrophic if that affects the installation medium (#1105000).
Hats off to Felix Crux for a stellar installation report!
- ethdetect: Show description for compressed kernel modules.
- ethdetect: Allow commas in the description of modules (#1090738).
* netcfg:
- Reject invalid input for static nameserver configuration.
- Update netcfg/get_netmask with masklen on static IP address.
* partman-auto:
- ppc64el: revert /boot filesystem from ext4 back to ext2, since
petitboot does not support ext4.
- ppc64el: create a separate ext2 /boot partition also for the
non-LVM case, as it already is for LVM. So we support petitboot in
all partitioning schemes.
* partman-auto-lvm:
- Ensure the correct partitions are used (#1092129).
* partman-base:
- Change default unit from MB to GB (#570410).
- Add support for the legacy_boot flag on GPT (#1034814, #1087489).
* partman-efi:
- Rework EFI partition management logic (#1092978, #1092892,
#1041168, #1034812, #1034208).
* partman-partitioning:
- Add support for the legacy_boot flag on GPT (#1034814).
* partman-xfs:
- Add support of "discard" mount option for XFS (#1092142).
- Add support of "prjquota" mount option for XFS (#1103244).
* rescue:
- Add preliminary support for rescuing Debian installed to a btrfs
subvolume (#1018894, #1103476). Supported rescue cases are:
+ The default installation to @rootfs (bullseye and later).
+ The default installation to subvolid=5 (buster or earlier).
* systemd-udeb:
- Split udev-udeb and libudev1-udeb into a dedicated source package.
* tzsetup:
- Replace legacy timezones with their modern counterparts (#1055541).
- Update cities/zones that have been renamed.
- Add templates for Cyprus.
* user-setup:
- High-level summary: Restore support for non-ASCII fullnames
(#1101069, #1101196, #1104550).
- Many more details are available in the user-setup 1.105 changelog
entry for the curious. Lots of thanks to our longtime adduser
maintainer, Marc Haber, and to the many who helped design then
implement a plan (Pascal Hambourg in particular).

Hardware support changes

* debian-installer:
- armhf: Drop u-boot image for PandaBoard, support was removed from
u-boot upstream version 2024.10.
* flash-kernel:
- Add Pine64 Pinebook.
- Add support for MNT Reform 2 with RCORE RK3588 Module.
- Add AM64x HummingBoard-T.
- Add Pine64 Star64 (#1092359).
- Add Wandboard rev D1 board.
- Add X Elite devices (HP Omnibook X 14, Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x, Asus
Vivobook S 15, Dell XPS 13 9345, Lenovo Thinkpad T14s Gen6,
Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 variants).
* linux:
- Put all clock modules in the kernel image udeb.
- [arm64] udeb: Add mtk-cmdq-mailbox to kernel-image.
- [arm64] udeb: Add modules for MediaTek devices.
- [arm64] Enable modules for Qualcomm SC7180 Chromebooks.
- [arm64] udeb: Add modules fo Qualcomm SC7180 Chromebooks.
- udeb: Add onboard_usb_dev to usb-modules.
- udeb: Move i2c-hid-of-elan module to fb-modules.
- udeb: add dm-thin-pool md-modules (#956226).
- [amd64,arm64] Add pmem modules to amd64 and arm64 kernel-image
udeb to support UEFI HTTP boot (or u-boot) in the installer.

Localization status

* 78 languages are supported in this release.
* Full translation for 26 of them.

Known bugs in this release

* There seems to be no known major bug as of yet.

See the errata[2] for details and a full list of known issues.

Feedback for this release

We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so please try it. Installation images, and everything else you will need are available at our web site[3].

Thanks

The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this release.

1. https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Team
2. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
3. https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer

Cheers,
Cyril Brulebois ( https://debamax.com/)
D-I release manager -- Release team member -- Freelance Consultant