Calamares 3.2.4 released

Feb 12, 2019

The Calamares team is happy to announce the availability of Calamares 3.2.4, the fourth update in the features-and-functionality series of Calamares 3.2.x. This is a lots-of-features and a bugfix release. There are new modules, too.

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):

  • Alf Gaida
  • aliveafter1000
  • Arnaud Ferraris
  • Caio Jordão Carvalho
  • Collabora LTD
  • Gabriel Craciunescu
  • Kevin Kofler
  • Philip Mueller
  • Scott Harvey

Core

  • The Calamares application now recognizes the -X or --xdg-config option, which adds XDG_DATA_DIRS to the places used to find QML and branding directories, and XDG_CONFIG_DIRS to the places used to find the global settings and module configurations. This allows a more fine-grained, and more layered, approach to setting up Calamares configurations (in particular, distro’s can add configuration files and give them priority, instead of forking configuration files).
  • The branding file now contains settings that control the size and resize behavior of Calamares. See the branding file for more documentation. In particular, the setting windowExpanding can be set to normal, fullscreen or noexpand.
  • The settings.conf file can now configure whether the Cancel button is shown (this isn’t a branding thing, because it’s quite fundamental to the workflow of the installer).

Modules

  • The partition module supports RAID devices, but only when Calamares is compiled with the newest KPMCore release (3.3.0).
  • The calculation of required space – including swap – has been simplified, and Calamares no longer reserves 2GiB of space in calculations for internal use (this means that it no longer mysteriously drops swap when the disk size is close to the required installation size).
  • The name of the type of default filesystem (e.g. ext4 or btrfs) is now handled case- and localization-insensitively. This means that btrfs is now always an acceptable spelling.
  • The currently-selected disk device is remembered between manual partitioning and the partitioning-overview pages. (Thanks to Arnaud)
  • partition There is new support for partitioning layout presets. See partition.conf for documentation and details.
  • The keyboard module now handles the (bogus) Austrian keymap for the system console properly. (Thanks to Kevin)
  • The preservefiles module now has a mechanism for setting the permissions (and ownership) of preserved files. (Thanks to Scott)
  • New module fsresizer can be used to resize filesystems. It is intended for use in OEM installs where an image of fixed size is created, and then sized to the actual SD card the user has used.
  • The mount module now handles missing extraMounts and extraMountsEfi keys gracefully (this is probably a misconfiguration, though, and gives a warning).
  • The packages module now supports pre- and post-script options for all operations, not just during install (keep in mind that these run as three separate shells, though).
  • A new rawfs module supports straightforward copying of filesystems from the installation media to the target stystem. This can be used, for instance, for block-level-identical installations.

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. Work towards the next release continues.

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