Debian Installer Buster Alpha 5 Has Initial UEFI Secure Boot Support

The fifth alpha of the Debian Installer for the upcoming Debian 10.0 "Buster" release is now available for testing. What makes this new release particularly important to test is that it features the initial UEFI Secure Boot support.

Debian 9 "Stretch" didn't get UEFI Secure Boot support in time while Debian developers have been working to ensure this year's release, Debian 10.0 Buster, will support this security standard found in PC hardware of recent years. The Secure Boot support isn't complete in this Debian Installer Buster Alpha 5 release, but it's getting close and in need of more widespread testing. Debian Buster will default to installing the signed packages on x86_64 hardware.

This new alpha of the Debian Installer also adds Zstd compression support to its Btrfs support, updates to the Linux 4.19 kernel, run-time optimizations for debootstrap, Xen PVH guest support within its GRUB2 bootloader, ReiserFS support has been dropped from Partconf, re-enabling of TLSv1.0 support for WPA-Supplicant, new ARM board entries, and various other improvements.

More details on the Debian Installer Buster Alpha 5 release via debian-boot. Those wanting to test out Debian's long overdue Secure Boot support can learn more details via this call for testing.