Available for all GNU/Linux distributions desiring a universal, independent, and fully customizable graphical installer, the Calamares 3.3 installer is finally here. With over a year and a half in development and launching over five years after version 3.2, this installment boasts of countless changes.
The changes brought about by Calamares 3.3 include additional support for more choices in the Bootloader module when you’re building the kernel command line, an overhauled fstab configuration, and enhanced capabilities for skipping the bootloader installation in more cases during the Partition module.
A new module named ‘zfshostid’ which copies ZFS-generated /etc/hostid is part of the new addition. Support for either LUKS or LUKS2 disk encryption during the Partition module, support for an adaptable kernel name in the Dracut module, and a present-day UI for both Keyboard and Locale modules are also included in the changes.
A new feature in the Netinstall module introduced by Calamares 3.3 is a non-checkable option for groups; this stops an entire group from being checked or unchecked at once. It is also worth noting that users still have the ability to inspect individual items in the group despite this.
Furthermore, this release allows the localization of the progress percentage during installation. It also strengthens the password security in the Users module by longer allowing for an empty password field, offering suggestions for other password-requirement schemes, and supporting stronger password hashes.
On top of that, the machineid module has been updated with support for several variations of writing the /etc/machine-id file, the unpackfs module now uses the -S option to rsync for sparse file support, and the packagechooser module now supports the latest AppStream 1.0 API.
Last but not least, the Keyboard module has been enhanced to be explicitly configured to use X11 keyboard settings or the FreeDesktop locale1 DBus service, the latter being useful for Calamares as an “initial setup” system in a Wayland session. It also supports keyboard switch configuration and the ability to write X11 layout configuration with variants for all non-ASCII layouts.
The new Calamares release will be part of major Linux OS releases coming in 2024 and onwards, including Lubuntu 24.04 LTS. If you’re a system integrator, you can download Calamares 3.3 right now from the official website. This release is compatible with the latest Qt 6 and KDE Frameworks 6 frameworks.
Last updated 12 hours ago