Getting bugs fixed is an important, if not crucial part of the quality assurance for any project. To solve issues, the quality of bug reports is important. When reporting try to include:

  • Name of Distribution used
    • version of the Distribution
    • if possible, link to the ISO file
    • if it is your own distro, or doesn’t have releases yet, put an ISO up on a file-sharing site somewhere.
  • Version of Calamares used (released version or git build)
    • the Calamares version can be seen in the log file, or in the About dialog on the welcome page
    • if possible, also the KPMCore version from your package manager.
  • Logs & Screenshots
    • The Calamares session log is placed in ~/.cache/calamares and is called session.log. It is placed in the home-directory of the user running Calamares, so that may be the root user. If it is not detailed, add -D6 to the flags passed to Calamares (meaning “debug logging level 6”, which is plenty).
    • Screenshots can also be photos, if no suitable screenshot / internet connection is available.
  • Use the ISSUE_TEMPLATE provided for you when opening an issue.

The place where to report bugs, issues, errors or feature request:
Calamares Issues (On GitHub).

Developers of Distributions

If you are a developer of a distribution and are new to Calamares, make sure to thoroughly read the Wiki pages provided for you. See the links on the left. Reporting issues is for bugs, errors, issues you may have found, or adding a new feature request. Issues are NOT a help channel. If you have questions left after reading the Wiki, use the Matrix channel to get help.

When reporting an issue or feature request, include as many of the following as possible (in addition to the info requested above):

  • Installation log
  • Link to an ISO of your distribution
  • Link to the settings.conf used
  • List custom modules used (not part of upstream Calamares)
  • Detailed description of how to duplicate the error/issue found
  • Version used of GCC (or other compiler), KPMCore, CMake & Qt

End Users

Most of the time, Calamares issues is not the place for you to report issues. Use the bug tracker of your distribution instead. Every distribution has their own implementation of Calamares and they can much better decide if the issue found is distribution specific or a general Calamares issue.

If you decide it is a general Calamares issue, make sure to include all information requested in the first section. In addition provide:

  • Is the issue related to a BIOS or UEFI system install?
  • Are you using a GPT or msdos partition table?
  • Try to find out from your distribution where they locate the installation.log and provide that log
  • Many time disk layout used is needed, provide the needed info with sudo blkid and sudo fdisk -l

Calamares is a community project.