What is CalamaresCalamares 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 BaseThe 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 lookSince 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.
If it doesn’t rain, things dry up. Calamares 3.2.40 took too long to get out the door, largely a consequence of having a number of big-ticket things on the milestone along with lots of little fiddly bits.
As a 3-months-long-release, this one has many more changes than the short-cycle releases from earlier in the 3.2 series. We expect to return to short-cycle – simply because that works better. We have several new contributors who helped to improve Calamares.
Calamares, like many Free Software projects, has been
using IRC for many years for real-time communication, for idle chit-chat and
for community-building. We now primarily use Matrix (#calamares:kde.org)
and secondarily the Libera.Chat IRC network (#calamares).
The Freenode channel that was the chatroom of the project from its
start in 2014 is no longer controlled, operated, or monitored by
the Calamares team.
Calamares serves the needs of several dozen Linux distributions, large and small, based on any one of the “big five” distro’s, with whatever desktop environment users would like. Two new faces (both Arch-derivatives) have joined the club this month, so let’s give them a bit of spotlight.