Calamares 3.2.0-rc4 available

Mar 12, 2018

The Calamares team is happy to announce the availability of Calamares 3.2.0-rc4, 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-rc4 is a features-and-functionality release.

  • Translations have been expanded, with many strings not-previously localized now available for translation (this mostly applies to error messages which we hope you don’t encounter).
  • There is a new command-line flag -D which switches on debugging output, without also enabling debug mode which loads modules from the current directory. You must give -D a debugging value from 0 to 8. Practical values are 0 (no debugging), 1 (errors only), 2 (errors and warnings) and 6 (not-quite verbose logging).
  • The debugging framework has seen an overhaul, so that debugging information can be more easily understood. The number in square brackets in a log message (e.g. [6]) is the debug-level, where lower numbers are more important. [1] is reserved for errors.
  • The contextualprocess module now also supports a fallback (wildcard) match. If no other value matches a global configuration value, then the commands associated with the * value are run.
  • Python jobs can now issue warnings through the API.
  • The locale.gen file is now edited more conservatively; only lines starting with a comment sign immediately followed by an enabled-locale are uncommented.
  • Screenshots in the Plasma Look-and-Feel module are resized to fit the display in the selection widget.
  • The build should now be reproducible.

The branding module has also seen an overhaul. This better supports branding modules that can be developed outside of the Calamares source tree (so reducing the need for forks). There is a calamares branding repository with examples, showing how branding modules can be built independently. The default Calamares slideshow framework has been extended with some new classes which can be used. Functionality that does not make sense in an install-time slideshow (e.g. hitting the c key clears the screen) has been removed. Distributions that use the Presentation and Slide QML classes provided by Calamares are strongly advised to double-check their slideshow functionality in this release.

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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