Calamares is an indepdendent Linux distro-installer, and we just released Calamares 3.3.7. There’s a couple of known issues that need tracking down, but it is a slow process – one entirely dependent on how much time volunteers are able and willing to put into careful bug reporting (and reproduction) and then dealing with code to fix them. Anyway, here’s some semi-coherent notes about Calamares and distro’s and issues and things.

Installing Kubuntu

I recently had to install an “emergency PC” for my mom, and picked Kubuntu – fairly arbitrarily, I must say. The install-Kubuntu icon does not look like Calamares, and first comes up with some other selection dialog in a different style, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it using Calamares after that.

It picked up Dutch from geo-location, which was fine. Less fine is that the Dutch translations aren’t complete. I’m pretty sure I could fix that.

Installation was straightforward, although I always pick “erase whole disk” and click through nearly all of the defaults. No complicated installs for me, and it worked without a hitch.

Mom didn’t need the emergency PC after all, so now I do have a spare low-end desktop machine with Kubuntu. I might turn it into a try-real-installs box for a while.

Building Calamares on KDE Neon

KDE Neon was a CI target for Calamares for a long time, but I switched it off in March 2024. Dependencies were a mess at the time, and the automatic CI builds were failing every night. Other distro’s didn’t have that struggle, so I put more CI weight on Fedora.

I did keep one of my desktop machines installed with KDE Neon, as a gaming machine. At least I can see what Plasma 6 is supposed to be like, as a reference for when we land it in FreeBSD. Untangling the package mess to return it to a development machine was just too much of a hassle.

At some point I removed Qt5 – and everything that depended on it – and then reinstalled some bits and did a pkcon update and whatever and the machine finally ended up in a workable state for development again, but don’t ask me exactly what I did and don’t talk to me about the upgrade experience.

Building Calamares on FreeBSD

It’s possible, just probably not very useful. Clang spits out mountains of warnings, which I occasionally try to address.

Not all of the warnings are all that useful – when dealing with command-line arguments, for instance. The relationship between argc and argv (conventional names for parameters) in main() is clear, but there’s nothing in the type of either to express that, so you get warnings like this one:

src/libcalamares/geoip/test_geoip.cpp:37:45: warning: unsafe buffer access [-Wunsafe-buffer-usage]
   37 |     QString selector = argc == 3 ? QString( argv[ 2 ] ) : QString();

Building Calamares on EndeavourOS

The live-ISO for EndeavourOS is one of my favorites. I don’t know why they ship an ISO with git in the live-image, but it means that I trivially have a system with a working Calamares configuration, which I can update with the latest version:

git clone http://github.com/calamares/calamares
cd calamares
sudo ./ci/deps-endeavouros.sh
sudo pacman -Scc
export CMAKE_ARGS="-DWITH_QT6=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug"
export BUILDDIR=build
./ci/build.sh

I have a VM with the live-ISO, but also two virtual disks attached. By doing the checkout and package download on one of the disks, and doing test-installs to the other, this is by far the easiest and most pleasant develop-and-test setup I have right now.

And the wallpaper is pretty nice, too.