14 DAY TRIAL // Today, June 30, 2016, the Calamares team has been proud to announce the final release and immediate availability for download of the Calamares 2.3 distribution-independent system installer.
Calamares is currently being used in numerous popular operating systems, including but not limited to KaOS, Apricity OS, Chakra GNU/Linux, Netrunner, Sabayon, and OpenMandriva. It is the universal installer framework that many GNU/Linux distributions should adopt as it's now one of the most advanced system installers.
After many months of hard work, the Calamares 2.3 is here as a drop-in replacement for the Calamares 2.2 series with many improvements. There are also a bunch of exciting new features, starting with the highly anticipated full-disk encryption and support for NVMe devices in fstab, and continuing with an advanced partitioning feature.
"It is the first installer with an automated 'Replace Partition' option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Calamares is designed to be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, thanks to third party branding and external modules support," reads today's announcement.
Encrypted SWAP partitions are supported as well
However, the full-disk encryption is the number one feature every distro maintainer has expected for so long. What this means for you, as the end user of a GNU/Linux operating system that employs the Calamares installer, is that, starting with the next ISO images of those distros, you'll be able to install the OS fully encrypted.
The full-disk encryption is based on the LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) disk encryption specification, and it looks like it also supports encrypted SWAP partitions, along with the ability to resume from suspend-to-disk. Best of all, when you're installing your operating system of choice with Calamares 2.3 with encryption enabled, the bootloader will be encrypted as well.
To see all the improvements implemented in Calamares 2.3, we recommend reading the official release announcement in full, where you'll also find the source archive. If you're a GNU/Linux distribution maintainer, go ahead and download/implement Calamares 2.3 on your upcoming ISO images.