14 DAY TRIAL // Calamares, the popular open-source distribution-independent system installer, was recently updated to version 3.0.1, the first point release to the major Calamares 3.0 series launched a few weeks ago.
Calamares 3.0.1 is not a big update, but only a small bugfix release that improved autologin configuration handling for the SDDM login manager, implements a decent exception handling to the networkcfg module, and addresses an issue in the users module that could break login when using passwords with non-Latin1 characters.
This first maintenance update also comes with a fully documented dummypythonqt module, which might come in handy to those who want to create PythonQt Calamares modules. More information should be available in the source archive that you can download right now from the announcement page.
Calamares 3 features a brand-new module interface based on PythonQt
System integrators are reminded that the Calamares 3 series no longer supports KPMcore 2 and they'll need to use KPMcore 3.0.2 or later when implementing the universal installer framework on their GNU/Linux distributions. Also, starting with version 3.0, Calamares features a brand-new module interface based on PythonQt.
"The PythonQt interface is optional, and allows module developers to create view modules in Python with Qt. To build Calamares with PythonQt support, the -DWITH_PYTHONQT=ON parameter must be passed to the cmake call. PythonQt 3.1 or later (built against Qt 5 and Python 3) is required," explained the developers.
If you're an OS vendor shipping your distro with the Calamares installer, we recommend updating to version 3.0.1 at your earliest convenience and deploying it on the next ISO respins for users to be able to get the best out-of-the-box graphical installation support available. More details can be found on the project's homepage and in the source tarball.