Arch Linux’s Menu-Based Installer Gets New Disk Preview, FIDO2 Support, and More

Marius Nestorby Marius Nestor0
Menu-Based Installer

The Arch Linux developers released today a new version (2.5.0) of their archinstall menu-based installer that brings yet another layer of new features and bug fixes to make Arch Linux installations easier.

Earlier this month, I took a look at Arch Linux’s new menu-based installer, which made installing Arch Linux easier for newcomers. Today, archinstall 2.5.0 has been released with a plethora of new features, including FIDO2 (HSM) support for systemd-boot when unlocking disk encryption with a master password as backup during enrollment. Archinstall now lets users use FIDO2 devices as an unlocking mechanism to a partition.

“Password is required due to the workflow of archinstall which will enroll a master password first, this is to automate operations. Post configuration can remove this master password if needed,” explained the devs. “This is in very early beta and has only been tested with an older blue Yubikey. Nitrokey and modern Yubikey’s are en route for testing. PIN entry and different devices have not been thoroughly tested.”

Archinstall’s main menu has been enriched in this release with a new disk preview, a new disk layout preview, as well as a user preview to the main menu. Also, different menu types have been added as well in version 2.5.0 to better handle the different return types of menu selections, along with general disk layout view improvements.

Archinstall 2.5.0 also improves user management and implements a new user structure in --config, adds remote loading to --config, --disk-layout and --creds, adds a retry=True call to the Partition.format() function to retry formatting in case a kernel delay occurs, and adds support for encoding pathlib.Path objects to the archinstall.general.JSON encoder.

Among other changes, archinstall 2.5.0 introduces the Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut for clearing the current option, automatically installs network-manager-applet when selecting a desktop profile and NetworkManager, and adds new language translations, including Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu.

Archinstall 2.5.0 also brings lots of bug fixes, so check out the full release notes on the project’s GitHub page, from where you can also download the source tarball for compilation, for more details. The new archinstall version is now available in the stable software repositories of Arch Linux if you want to use it the next time you want to deploy the popular GNU/Linux distribution on new computers.

Last updated 2 years ago

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