by 
The Debian Project continue their work on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system, due out in summer 2021, and they released today the first Release Candidate of the Debian Installer for Debian 11.
Coming four months after the last Alpha milestone, the Release Candidate (RC) of the Debian Bullseye Installer is here to bump kernel support from Linux 5.9 to the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, which I think it will be the final kernel that Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” will ship with.
Of course, this change alone brings better hardware support, but the Debian Installer Bullseye Release Candidate also adds support for several single-board computers, such as the Banana Pi BPI-M2-Ultra, Banana Pi BPI-M3, Orange Pi One Plus, ROCK Pi 4a, ROCK Pi 4b, and ROCK Pi 4c, as well as support for the Rockchip RK3399 processor found in numerous devices.
Among other noteworthy changes, the graphical Debian Installer for Debian 11 Bullseye is now using the libinput library for handling input devices in Wayland compositors and provide a generic X.Org input driver rather than the evdev driver, which improves support for touchpads, adds support for creating partitions on USB UAS devices, and adds SBAT (Secure Boot Advanced Targeting) support in the GRUB2 bootloader to improve security.
Moreover, minimal subvolume support for the root (/) partition was added in partman-btrfs, it’s now possible to use the underscore character in the username of the first account created during the installation process, and the winning Homeworld theme created by Juliette Taka for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” is now enabled by default.
Of course, there are also numerous bug fixes and you can study the full changelog here if you want to know what exactly was changed/improved in this first Release Candidate of the Debian Bullseye Installer.
If you’re willing to give it a try, please keep in mind that the rescue mode is broken in the graphical installer and that the amdgpu open-source graphics driver is required to enable support for many AMD graphic cards. You can download the Debian Installer Bullseye RC1 right now from the official website.
Image credits: Debian Project/Juliette Taka
Last updated 3 years ago
