Calamares 3.3.0 will have at least rudimentary Qt6 support. The libraries build, and so does the main executable and the welcome and finished modules. This means that a “purely Qt6” Calamares might be possible, except for the dependencies on KDE Frameworks and KPMCore which have not had suitable releases yet.
What is Calamares
Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. Calamares aims to be easy, usable & beautiful while remaining independent of any particular Linux distribution.
Knowledge Base
The Guide linked above has documentation for end-users, the wiki is mostly for distro developers. The developer’s guide contains information on building Calamares, on its design, and localization.
Calamares look
Since Calamares is designed to be customized, themed and branded by individual distributions, it can look very different when used by specific distributions. A separate extensions package contains examples and custom modules.
Latest News:
Calamares and Qt6
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Calamares 3.3.0-alpha3 released
This is the second announced release of an alpha of Calamares 3.3. It comes after a long long year of slow-progress, although there are lots of new contributors.
This release contains contributions from (alphabetically by first name):
- Adriaan de Groot
- Aleksey Samoilov
- Anke Boersma
- Arjen Balfoort
- Boria138
- Brian Morison
- Emir Sari
- Evan Goode
- Evan James
- Ficelloo
- Hector Martin
- Jeremy Attall
- Johannes Kamprad
- Kasta Hashemi
- Kevin Kofler
- Mario Haustein
- Masato TOYOSHIMA
- Panda
- Paolo Dongilli
- Peter Jung
- Philip Müller
- Shivanand
- Sławomir Lach
- Sunderland93
- wiz64
Core
- Incompatible module-configuration changes, see #1438.
- Branding entries use ${var} instead of @{var} for substitutions,
in line with all the other substitution mechanisms used from C++
core. See documentation in
branding.desc. - Boost::Python requires at least version 1.72.
- KDE Frameworks must be version 5.58 or later.
- The
INSTALL_CONFIGoption has been removed. If you are installing the example configuration files from the Calamares repository, just stop. That was never a good idea, and you should keep your configs elsewhere. - Progress percentage during install can now be localized. (thanks Emir)
Modules
- dracut added a configurable kernel name. (thanks Anke)
- initcpiocfg orders hookds slightly differently. (thanks Peter)
- localeq moved to using Drawer instead of ComboBox in UI. (thanks Anke)
- keyboardq moved to using Drawer instead of ComboBox in UI. (thanks Anke)
- netinstall now has a new noncheckable option for groups, which prevent it a group from being checked/uncheckd as a whole. You can still check individual items in the group though. (thanks Shivanand)
- partition can now pick LUKS or LUKS2. (thanks Jeremy)
- zfs creates a hostid through zgenhostid.
- zfshostid new module to copy zfs generated /etc/hostid
TODO
In the interest of planning the next release, here are some items that I think are required to get the 3.3.0 release out the door:
- Complete the namespace-conversion (drop namespace
CalamaresUtils) - Drop Boost::Python and write the (very small) Python bindings by hand
- Restore the installation of config files from the repo. This was removed for 3.3.0-alpha2 because forking the repo to modify the configuration is a terrible idea. But this also breaks patching-the-configurations at build- or packaging-time, which is a legitimate use-case.
Feedback
If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker. For a full change list, see the full list of issues closed within the current generation (which is many releases).
Calamares Extensions 1.3.2
There is a new irregular release of Calamares Extensions. Calamares Extensions are additional modules for Calamares that do not fit in the “core” Calamares release – extra-specialised modules, OS-specific modules, and modules for unique situations. Most recent work has been on the mobile module.