Calamares 2.4.5 is out

Nov 25, 2016

The Calamares team is happy to announce the immediate availability of Calamares 2.4.5, a bug fix release that delivers improvements and fixes for recently discovered issues.

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.

Highlights of this release include:

  • fixed a path handling issue which could sometimes occur when reusing an existing EFI system partition;
  • fixes and reliability improvements for the internet connection check in the welcome module;
  • fixed GRUB deployment with 32-bit UEFI firmware (note: this also affects some 64-bit systems which ship a 32-bit UEFI firmware);
  • fixed operating system detection for automatic dual boot setup in GRUB;
  • added Btrfs subvolumes setup for @ and @home in automated install modes (note: manual partitioning still doesn’t support Btrfs subvolumes, as this requires further work in both KPMcore and Calamares);
  • fixed a security issue which could happen when using manual partitioning to set up a system with an encrypted root partition, but with an unencrypted separate /boot partition.

Notes for packagers and system integrators:

  • system integrators who ship their own modified mount.conf should update it so it bind-mounts /run/udev like the upstream mount.conf, otherwise GRUB’s os-prober instance will fail to detect existing operating systems;
  • with Calamares 2.4.5 it is still possible for a user to set up encrypted / with unencrypted /boot, but such a setup is not recommended and obsolete for most use cases since GRUB supports booting from an encrypted /boot partition or directory;
  • it is advised for system integrators who use Dracut or Debian-initramfs to test various scenarios with encrypted and unencrypted /boot partitions thoroughly because of the changes mentioned above.

The partitioning module of Calamares 2.4.5 requires KPMcore 2.2 or 2.2.1. 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-2.4.5.tar.gz

MD5: ec4805b7322748d13d869e7f3e1b42f7

SHA1: ece125baeb35dfd61b404187c6e0e89d7af051ec

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