Calamares 3.2.40 released

Jul 14, 2021

If it doesn’t rain, things dry up. Calamares 3.2.40 took too long to get out the door, largely a consequence of having a number of big-ticket things on the milestone along with lots of little fiddly bits.

As a 3-months-long-release, this one has many more changes than the short-cycle releases from earlier in the 3.2 series. We expect to return to short-cycle – simply because that works better. We have several new contributors who helped to improve Calamares.

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

  • Anke Boersma
  • Anubhav Choudhary (SoK success!)
  • Emmanuel Arias (new contributor! welcome!)
  • Erik Dubois
  • Jerrod Frost (new contributor! welcome!)
  • Jia Chao (new contributor! welcome!)
  • Joe Kamprad
  • Lisa Vitolo (blast from the past!)
  • Omer I.S. (new contributor! welcome!)

In project news, chat (instant-messaging) communications has largely moved to Matrix and Libera.Chat. CI notifications – issues and build results – are sent to Matrix only.

Core

  • The CMake modules for consumption by external modules (e.g. the calamares-extensions repository, but also any other modules built by distro’s for internal use) now support consistent skip-module behavior and reporting. #1641 (one tiny part of this change)
  • In global storage, the filesystem_use key now has an API in libcalamares to systematically mark filesystem (types) as “in use” or not. This, in turn, means that modules can depend on that information for other work (e.g. removing drivers for unused filesystems). #1635
  • The “upload log file” now has a configurable log-file-size. (Thanks Anubhav)

Modules

  • bootloader can now install an aarch64 (ARM) compatible EFI GRUB. (Thanks Jia)
  • displaymanager example configuration has been shuffled around a bit, for better results when the live image is running XFCE. Also lists more potential display managers. #1205 (Thanks Erik)
  • keyboard now switches on an alternate en_US keyboard layout when Arabic or Hebrew is selected as primary layout. (Thanks Omer)
  • localeq now has a fully functional offline option (alongside the default interactive map option, which requires internet).
  • The netinstall module can now fall back to alternative URLs when loading groups data. The first URL to yield a non-empty groups collection is accepted. No changes are needed in the configuration. #1673
  • packagechooser can now integrate with the packages module; that means you can specify package names to install for a given selection, and the regular package-installation mechanism will take care of it. Legacy configurations that use contextualprocess are still supported. See the packagechooser.conf file for details. #1550
  • A long-neglected pull request from Lisa Vitolo for the partition module – allowing to set filesystem labels during manual partitioning – has been revived and merged.
  • The partition manager has had a long-standing bug with partition-flags and manual partitioning resolved. This may help resolve some installation issues on UEFI systems. #1724
  • usersq is further implemented and can now be used for a successful install. Not all warning messages available in the regular users module are implemented.
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