Calamares 2.3 is out
Jun 30, 2016
The Calamares team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 2.3, a feature release that brings many incremental improvements over the Calamares 2.2 series, as well as new features such as full disk encryption.
Calamares 2.3 about to install with full disk encryption, on Manjaro Linux.
Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer, with an advanced partitioning feature for both manual and automated partitioning operations. It is the first installer with an automated “Replace Partition” option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Calamares is designed to be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, thanks to third party branding and external modules support.
The big focus of the Calamares 2.3 development cycle was implementing support for installing with full disk encryption. A lot of work was put into KPMcore, KDE Partition Manager, the Calamares partitioning module, and a number of other modules. The encryption feature in Calamares 2.3 acts as a basic configuration interface for LUKS, with the goal of making it as as easy and newbie-proof as possible without sacrificing security. If the encryption feature is enabled, Calamares 2.3 also encrypts the boot loader, and the user is only prompted for the passphrase once. Swap partition encryption is also supported, as well as resuming from suspend-to-disk with an encrypted swap partition.
Other highlights of this release include:
- fixed a long standing and hard to debug issue with occasional unwanted resize operations being executed;
- added a partitioning module configuration option for showing partition labels in the manual partitioning interface;
- improved support for NVME devices in fstab;
- much improved
mke2fsande2fsckhandling, which fixes a multitude of random (but not very frequent) install failures; - improved restart command configuration handling in the finished module;
- implemented type to search support in the keyboard module;
- added a partitioning module configuration option for selecting the default filesystem type;
- countless other bug fixes.
The partitioning module of Calamares 2.3 depends on KPMcore 2.2 or later. Further distribution-specific deployment adjustments may be needed for full LUKS support, for more details see the Calamares wiki.
If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker.
Download: calamares-2.3.tar.gz
MD5: c032dfbd5dd9c8d26fdcdd1f5090916a
SHA1: 49ab7fe7cc351282be3e92926636bef1e5f2ef8a