| Chapter 3. Installation System | ||
|---|---|---|
 |  | |
| Chapter 3. Installation System | ||
|---|---|---|
| | | |
Table of Contents
The Debian Installer is the official installation system for Debian. It offers a variety of installation methods. Which methods are available to install your system depends on your architecture.
Images of the installer for jessie can be found together with the Installation Guide on the Debian website.
The Installation Guide is also included on the first CD/DVD of the official Debian CD/DVD sets, at:
/doc/install/manual/language/index.html
You may also want to check the errata for debian-installer for a list of known issues.
There has been a lot of development on the Debian Installer since its previous official release with Debian 7, resulting in both improved hardware support and some exciting new features.
In these Release Notes we'll only list the major changes in the installer. If you are interested in an overview of the detailed changes since wheezy, please check the release announcements for the jessie beta and RC releases available from the Debian Installer's news history.
Support for the 'ia64' and 'sparc' architectures has been dropped from the installer since they have been removed from the archive.
Support for the 'arm64' and 'ppc64el' architectures has been added to the installer.
The installation system now installs systemd as the default init system.
The desktop can now be chosen within tasksel during installation. Note that several desktops can be selected at the same time, but some combinations of desktops may not be co-installable.
Due to a change on the Linux kernel side, the "---" separator is now used instead of the historical "--" to separate kernel parameters from userland parameters.
Thanks to the huge efforts of translators, Debian can now be installed in 75 languages, including English. This is one more language than in wheezy. Most languages are available in both the text-based installation user interface and the graphical user interface, while some are only available in the graphical user interface.
Languages added in this release:
Tajik has been added to the graphical and text-based installer.
The languages that can only be selected using the graphical installer as their character sets cannot be presented in a non-graphical environment are: Amharic, Bengali, Dzongkha, Gujarati, Hindi, Georgian, Kannada, Khmer, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Tibetan and Uyghur.
The Jessie installer improves support for a lot of UEFI firmware and also supports installing on 32-bit UEFI firmware with a 64-bit kernel.
Note that this does not include support for UEFI Secure Boot.
Some changes mentioned in the previous section also imply changes in the support in the installer for automated installation using preconfiguration files. This means that if you have existing preconfiguration files that worked with the wheezy installer, you cannot expect these to work with the new installer without modification.
The Installation Guide has an updated separate appendix with extensive documentation on using preconfiguration.
| | | |
| Chapter 2. What's new in Debian 8 |  | Chapter 4. Upgrades from Debian 7 (wheezy) |