Support for 32-bit UEFI GRUB is now available

Mar 28, 2016 15:53 GMT  ·  By

The Calamares distribution-independent graphical installer used in various operating systems, including Manjaro Linux, Sabayon, and many others, has been updated to version 2.2.

According to the release notes, Calamares 2.2 comes with several new interesting features, among which we can mention support for NVMe SSDs, which require KPMcore 2.1.1, support for 32-bit UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) GRUB bootloaders, as well as support for "replacing" free disk space.

Additionally, Calamares 2.2 includes multiple improvements to the debug interface, which should come in handy to GNU/Linux distribution maintainers, fixes for some issues in the partitioning module, and the implementation of automated GDB (GNU Debugger) and Breakpad-based crash reporting infrastructure with libcrashreporter-qt.

"Please be advised that as of Calamares 2.2, if you are building from git master, you now need to initialize the libcrashreporter-qt submodule as documented in README.md. End users and packagers who use our 2.2 tarball are not affected," reads the announcement. "If you experience an issue with Calamares, please tell us all about it on the Calamares issue tracker."

Calamares now features an automated “Replace Partition” option

As mentioned before, the latest version of the Calamares distribution-independent system installer ships with a new option called "Replace Partition," allowing users to reuse a disk partition as many times as they want/need, which should be very useful for those who are frequently testing GNU/Linux operating system.

Calamares is also the first graphical installer with an advanced partitioning module, allowing for both automated and manual partitioning operations. The latest version, Calamares 2.2, is now available for download from the project's GitHub page. Again, please try to keep in mind that Calamares 2.2 depends on KPMcore 2.1, but you'll need KPMcore 2.1.1 for NVMe support.