14 DAY TRIAL // Cyril Brulebois of the Debian Installer team announced this weekend the availability of the fourth and probably last RC (Release Candidate) milestone of the installer of the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system.
This announcement comes just one day after the Debian Project finally unveiled the official release date of Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" as June 17, 2017, and the team informs those willing to test drive RC versions of the Debian Stretch Installer about the latest bug fixes and improvements implemented.
There aren't all that many changes in the Debian Installer Stretch RC4 release, and among those that caught our attention, we can mention support for Xunlong Orange Pi Plus and Xunlong Orange Pi Plus 2 single-board computers, switch to DTB for Buffalo Linkstation LiveV3 (LS-CHL), and bump of Linux kernel version to 4.9.0-3.
u-boot images re-enabled for OpenRD
Additionally, the fourth Release Candidate of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" Installer re-enables u-boot images for OpenRD, adds all AHCI drivers in sata-modules, includes tifm_7xx1 to mmc-modules, and moves mfd-core to kernel-image, as it appears to be required by both mmc-modules and input-modules.
The default hostname was switched from ftp.debian.org to deb.debian.org in both the 92updates and 93backports generators, the speech-enabled boot menu entries were fixed for advanced options, as well as the external 32-bit speech entry from the multiarch ISO image.
Other than that, this release removes the code using device mapper from os-prober as it no longer works as expected in Debian Installer, which now relies on grub-mount, and the IPv6 autoconfiguration now correctly handles NTP server names, which are now stored as the hostname provided by DHCP.
Early adopters can download the Debian Installer Stretch RC4 release source tarball right now from our website if they want to take it for a test drive, but please try to keep in mind that known issues are still present in this development build, so it is recommended that you don't use it in production environments just yet.