(Please reply to the debian-boot list.)
Preparations for Release Candidate 1 of the installer have now really
started. All important functional changes are now included in the daily
images.
In order improve the quality of the release and reduce the number of nasty
surprises afterwards, it would be great if we could get some help testing
the installer during *this week*.
Please make sure you use one of the _daily built_ images available from:
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/
or
http://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/daily-builds/daily/arch-latest/
and file an installation report with your findings:
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch05s03.html#submit-bug
See this wiki page for a general overview of the planned release,
including known issues:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/EtchRC1Prep
Testing the installer for your favorite architecture(s)
=======================================================
This is the main focus for this call for testing. Please let us know if
there are any important issues, especially regressions from previous
releases. If you can, try different installation methods.
Note that the installer still uses 2.6.17. Main reason is that 2.6.18 is
not yet ready to migrate to testing and switching to 2.6.18 would
therefore block RC1 of d-i. Depending on the kernel team and RMs, we may
still switch to 2.6.18 before RC1, but switching immediately afterwards
looks more likely.
Other things to test
====================
There is a number of other things that could be tested, mostly new
functionality that was added recently:
- graphical installer, especially whether your mouse and touchpad work
correctly
- crypto support in partman: the installer now has crypto support both
for guided [1] and manual [2] partitioning; thorough tests, including
of the actual security of the installed system, very, very welcome
- automatic raid partitioning (preseeded only [1])
- 2.6 based installation floppies for i386
- support for non-standard filesystems (i.e. anything other than ext3)
- if you speak a language other than English, consider installing in
that language; note that one last round of translation updates is
still planned, but reports of issues are still appreciated
TIA,
Frans Pop
[1]http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch06s03.html#di-partition
[2]http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch06s03.html#partman-crypto
[3]http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/apbs04.html#preseed-partman-raid