Arch Linux’s Archinstall Gets a Brand-New Menu System, Many Other New Features

Archinstall

Arch Linux’s archinstall installation script has been updated today to version 2.4.1, a release that introduces numerous new features and improvements, as well as many bug fixes.

The biggest new feature of the Archinstall 2.4.1 release is a completely new menu system, which you can see in the screenshot above. The brand-new menu system uses the simple-term-menu Python package that creates simple interactive menus on the command line and it’s accessibility friendly. In addition, Guided has been updated to use the new menu system.

The new menu system should make installing the Arch Linux distribution even easier than before. Users with visual disabilities can use “numpad *” to change the tracking mode from default to tracking selection mode, which will make espeakup work in previous versions.

Other new features of the Archinstall 2.4.1 release include support for Btrfs compression when selecting it as the main file system, support for multiple NIC configurations at the same time when doing manual network configuration, as well as support for seamlessly loading configurations and saving them using the “archinstall” format.

Furthermore, Arch Linux’s installation script now allows for more complex Btrfs layouts, adds a “bind name” definition to partitions in an attempt to deal with Btrfs “virtual” namespace, adds support for installing the Qtile windows manager during the installation, and adds an application profile to properly configure PipeWire.

The partitioning mechanism has been improved as well in this new Archinstall release, which also adds a new plugin to perform post-creation actions on user profiles, replaces the Kate text editor with KWrite in the KDE profile, adds typing support throughout the installation script, and improves the xorg profile to properly set amdgpu modules in the mkinitcpio hooks.

Of course, there are numerous other changes included in this update, which will be part of the next Arch Linux ISO snapshot that’s scheduled for release on May 1st, 2022. For more details, you should check out the release notes on the project’s GitHub page.

Image credits: Arch Linux

Last updated 2 years ago

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