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After more than a year and a half in the works and coming more than five years after version 3.2, the Calamares 3.3 installer is now available for GNU/Linux distributions that want a universal, independent, and fully customizable graphical installer.
Calamares 3.3 brings numerous changes, including support for more options in the Bootloader module when building the kernel command line, revamped fstab configuration, and support for skipping the bootloader installation in the Partition module in more scenarios.
It also introduces a new module called zfshostid for copying ZFS-generated /etc/hostid, support for LUKS or LUKS2 disk encryption in the Partition module, support for a configurable kernel name in the Dracut module, as well as modernized UI for both Keyboard and Locale modules.
Calamares 3.3 also updates the Netinstall module with a new non-checkable option for groups to prevent a group from being checked or unchecked as a whole. The devs note the fact that users can still check individual items in the group though.
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 5 months ago
