Calamares 3.2.21 released

Mar 27, 2020

After a month in which the world changed considerably, the Calamares team is announces the availability of Calamares 3.2.21, a features-and-bugfixes release. The Calamares 3.2 branch continues to be developed, but a 3.3 branch seems to be coming closer.

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.

This release contains contributions from (alphabetically by first name):

  • Anke Boersma
  • Camilo Higuita
  • Gabriel Craciunescu
  • Gaël PORTAY

Core

  • Python job modules (such as unpackfs or packages) can now provide a pretty_status_message() function, like the existing pretty_name() function, that is used to update the status during install. #1330
  • QML support-modules and objects are now registered into the io.calamares namespace. This affects modules using Calamares models inside their QML UI (at this point, very few). With this release, the necessary import for Calamares parts looks like
    import io.calamares.ui 1.0
    

    A complete list of objects available from Calamares van be found in the documentation in Qml.h.

  • The sidebar (which shows overall progress in the installation) is now more configurable: the branding key sidebar controls it. The sidebar can be shown as a widget (default, as it has been), hidden, or use a new QML view which is more easily customised.
  • A new settings.conf key quit-at-end will automatically close Calamares (by clicking on the Done button) when the end of the sequence is reached. If finished is the last module in the sequence, this will run whatever it is configured for; you can also leave out the finished page and Calamares will close after the exec parts.

Modules

  • packages now reports more details in the installation progress-bar.
  • netinstall module supports an expanded key, which will pre-expand a group (as if the user had pressed the arrow-button in the tree-view). This only affects the UI, and only the outermost level of groups.
  • netinstall module now supports a special value for groupsUrl. Setting this to local will read the groups directly from the configuration file.
  • netinstall groups now support a new key immutable which prevents their check-state from being changed (they are shown, or hidden, as usual and can be expanded).
  • Modules that use QML need a new import line. The QML file for the module is configured through new keys qmlSearch and qmlFilename (previously those were without the qml prefix, which invites name collisions). The full module identifier is also used as a filename, so that multiple instances of a module can use different QML files.
  • partition module has a number of new features and settings for type, UUID, and filesystem characteristics. Thanks to Gaël.

Feedback

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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