I haven’t seen this posted anywhere yet, but the Debian folks have released RC3 of the Debian Installer yesterday. I just happen to stop by there this evening because I wanted to install it on another computer and saw this notice. The rumors are that Sarge is going to be released next month.
I was surprised by how fast I was able to get a Gnome environment installed and workign very well. The only issue is just it’s not as polished as other Gnome installs. The fonts look horrible and some of the colors clash to the point you can’t even read text. But it is very usuable.