Calamares 3.2.0-rc3 available

Jan 31, 2018

The Calamares team is happy to announce the availability of Calamares 3.2.0-rc3, a (testing) pre-release of the upcoming features-and-functionality of Calamares 3.2.0. This is the new series of Calamares releases following on from the stable 3.1 series.

Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer, with an advanced partitioning feature for both manual and automated partitioning operations. Calamares is designed to be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, thanks to third party branding and external modules support.

Calamares 3.2.0-rc3 is a features-and-functionality release.

  • New translations Hindi, Marathi (thanks to asaagar) and Albanian (thanks to besnik) are now available.
  • Documentation improvements (thanks to crazy, rajudev).
  • CMake now reports on skipped modules at the end of the configuration phase. This will list modules explicitly skipped by the build configuration, but also optional modules that are skipped because of missing dependencies.
  • Minor polishing and tidying all over the place (thanks to bezzy1999, bill-auger).
  • It is now possible to configure Calamares to “phone home” at the end of an installation and to configure update-manager with a machine-specific URL. Use the tracking module for this.
  • A new module supporting OpenRC initialization of encrypted filesystems. For distro’s that do not use systemd, the openrcdmcryptcfg module can be used alongside other modules.
  • A new module for KDE Plasma Desktop has been added. This allows the selection of the Plasma Look-and-Feel from the installer. This module is enabled only when the KDE Plasma and KDE Package frameworks are available at build time, and requires run-time support through the Plasma look-and-feel tool.
  • Improved guessing of keyboard layouts based on the system language. For example, Catalan and Hausa now select appropriate default keyboard mappings instead of their national defaults (Spanish and English, respectively).
  • New modules ShellProcess and ContextualProcess can run lists of (shell) commands. The ShellProcess module can replace other modules that are copied from dummyprocess with a single configuration file and an instance declaration in settings.conf (e.g. replace a forked module with a configuration file). The ContextualProcess module runs a list of shell commands based on the value of global configuration values (e.g. the firmware type of the host system).
  • The bootloader module now has a knob installEFIFallback which can be set to false if you expect only to install on non-broken UEFI setups (all modern boards).

Changed optional requirements:

  • KCrash (known from the desktop helper Dr Konqi) is now an optional dependency; it can help developers and users report problems with Calamares.

Changed mandatory requirements:

  • Libparted is no longer mandatory. If the library is missing, Calamares will ignore the (rather inaccurate) check for available space for installation in the welcome screen. If the check is enabled in welcome.conf, it will always fail.
  • KPMcore 3.3 is required. If the required KPMCore version is not available, the partition module is skipped (this will be noted in the CMake output).

If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker. For a full change list, or the full list of issues closed with this release, please see the Calamares code repository.

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