Debian Installer Releases First Alpha For 9.0 "Stretch"

While Debian 9.0 "Stretch" most likely will not be officially released until 2017 given that Debian 8 "Jessie" was just released a few months ago, the Debian Installer team has already put out their first alpha version for Stretch.

Cyril Brulebois, acting on the behalf of the DI Team, announced the first alpha of their installer for Debian 9 "Stretch". One of the immediate changes this cycle is that the installer will now default to the graphical mode where supported instead of the text mode. However, the text mode will continue to be supported.

Another big change with the Debian Installer for 9.0 Stretch is that AMD64 (x86_64) is now the default architecture for the multi-arch image rather than i386.

Also with this Debian Installer 9 Alpha 1 release is the use of the Linux 4.0 kernel, using ifnames rather than MAC for the network interface names, support for pre-seeding RAID10 with partman-md, Device Tree additions for many ARM boards, and there are various other installer-related / hardware support updates too.

More details via the release announcement that just hit the wire.