This article will focus on Calamares installer, another tool that makes it easier to use GNU / Linux.
What is Calamares graphical installer ?
Calamares is an installation tool for GNU / Linux distributions. It strives to be lightweight, user-friendly, beautiful, pragmatic, dissimilar, and distro-independent. Flexible in settings, simple and user-friendly OS installer that does not relate to any one command. This is a vivid example of the philosophy of the GNU project, when developers from different teams jointly created one product. It is now used in dozens of distributions and a few others who are close to it.
Calamares is maintained by the Calamares team. Most are also KDE developers, with contributions from BBQLinux, Fedora, KaOS, Kubuntu, Manjaro, Maui, Netrunner, and OpenMandriva.
The program has its own site with screenshots, descriptions, wiki, links to sources, instructions for use, and more.
Most of it is written in C ++ using Qt as the user interface, and comes with multiple licenses. There are already ready-made modules for the extension, but you can write your own.
Distribution creators can change the appearance of the installer, provide the process with illustrations and explanations, expand the installation process by adding new modules. A striking example is ArcoLinux, before the installation of which the choice of kernels, environments, software for communication, multimedia, terminal emulators, file managers, etc. is added to the standard steps, which mixes working environments with each other, and allows the user to pre-configure the working environment for himself. Different editions have different installation settings.
The installer is fully graphical, is used when installing in Live mode (that is, from the Desktop), supports various languages, allows you to set the language and time zone for the system with a choice of a specific city on the map, create partition tables, partition disks / SSDs per megabyte, for each section, set the label, FS and keys, install the bootloader on the selected device or root, enter the username and PC, user and root passwords, at the end displays a list of changes that will be made during installation. The name of the action being performed is written next to the progress bar, which allows you to track the operation leading to the interruption.
