Debian Project’s Cyril Bruleboi is today announcing the availability of the second RC (Release Candidate) version of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Installer system.
Coming approximately two and a half weeks after the release of the first RC build, Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Installer RC2 appears to come with fewer improvements, but some of them are quite exciting. For example, the kernel was bumped from the deprecated Linux 4.8 branch to the long-term supported Linux 4.9 series, and a major update of the os-prober utility is now included.
“This component is responsible for finding other operating systems so that entries can be added to the bootloader’s menu. This update should fix serious bugs, some of which leading to file system corruption, but might also trigger some regressions. As usual, running “reportbug os-prober” from the installed system lets you report any issues,” said Cyril Brulebois in the mailing list announcement.
The Debian Installer Stretch RC2 release notes shows that most of the changes are about the new os-prober version, which ships with better logging of mounting, deprecation of “(loader)” suffixes on Microsoft Windows operating systems, support for skipping certain partitions formatted with a LVM2_member file system type, as well as support for grub-common and grub-mount-udeb as dependencies.
Additionally, os-prober now makes use of read-only device-mapper entries if needed, improves setting of partitions to read-only or read-write, improves detection of /usr partitions to be recognized as GNU/Linux root partitions if the /lib* dirs are to be moved to /usr completely, will now avoid mounting of extended partitions, updates the yaboot parser to be more tolerant, and implements os-release support.
Armel/versatile flavor no longer supported
Among other changes implemented in this second Release Candidate build of the Debian Stretch Installer, we can mention the deprecation of the armel/versatile flavor because upstream Linux kernel support is no longer available, implementation of machine db entry for PINE64 single-board computers, installs all NIC modules in the netbood initrd for MIPS hardware, and adds switch (DSA) drivers to nic-modules.
A total of 75 languages are supported in the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” Installer RC2 release, and twelve of them are fully translated. If you want to test this pre-release version, we invite you to download the source tarball right now from our website, but please try to keep in mind that it should be used only for testing purposes. The final release of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch” operating system is expected sometime at the end of February or early March 2017.
