14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the open source Calamares universal installer framework used in various GNU/Linux distributions, including Chakra, KaOS, and Netrunner, announced the release of version 2.4.4.
Calamares 2.4.4 is the fourth maintenance update to the stable 2.4 series, adding a bunch of improvements and new features. Among these, we can mention improvements to the flag management of EFI system partitions, which deprecates the use of the sgdisk program, and better parsing of SDDM display manager configuration.
Furthermore, there's now support for selecting visible groups in the netinstall module by default, a new option that allows updating the database of packages before running any other package management operation, and support for the "try_remove" and "try_install" parameters in the packages module configuration.
Calamares 2.4.4 requires KPMcore 2.2 or 2.2.1
Among other changes implemented in the Calamares 2.4.4 release, we can mention a fix for a potential failure with the unpackfs module, which might have been caused by the inability of the software to write extended attributes to a file system that does not support them. Also, it appears that KPMcore version 2.2 or 2.2.1 is now required.
"The partitioning module of Calamares 2.4.4 requires KPMcore 2.2 or 2.2.1. Further distribution-specific deployment adjustments may be needed for full LUKS support, for more details see the Calamares wiki," explained the developers. "If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker."
Calamares 2.4.4 is available for download right now on the project's homepage, and it's a recommended update for GNU/Linux distributions that use the universal installer framework as the default graphical installer in their ISO images. Calamares is intended only for distro developers, not end-users.