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2.4 Calamares Framework

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D3vil0p3r edited this page May 31, 2023 · 2 revisions

Calamares Installer is an installer customizable framework with the purpose to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. Calamares aims to be easy and usable while remaining independent of any Linux distribution. For these reasons, it has been chosen as installation framework in Athena.

Calamares has been configured with several modules invoked inside /etc/calamares/settings.conf at the installation time. This configuration file mainly provides the following sections:

  • Welcome: allowing the user to set the preferred language
  • Kernel: allowing the user to set the kernel type
  • Shell: showing the shell to be used
  • Driver: showing several drivers to be installed
  • Drivers Nv: focused on Nvidia drivers
  • GPGPU: consisting of OpenCL modules useful for improving the cracking activities
  • Login Manager: showing several login managers set for Athena
  • Themes: showing several themes created for Athena
  • Location: setting time zone and locale values
  • Keyboard: setting keyboard type and layout
  • Partitions: setting the partition where the OS should be installed
  • Users: setting the first user on the environment

Further modules could be added in the future, according to the user needs. Under the hood of these modules, several processes are run. The main ones are:

  • contextualprocess: manage the applied theme chosen by the user and set all the elements of the environment according to the theme itself.
  • shellprocess-before: initialize repository keys, enable cron and clean shell configuration file from system commands.
  • shellprocess-final: enable services focused on increasing system performance, set right permissions for critical folders, check for virtual machine tools if needed and remove the system installation files.

During the installation, the user can click on “Toggle log” button for reading in real time the installation logs. In case the installation gets some issues, Calamares provides to the user a link to https://termbin.com where the logs are temporary saved in order to be accessed by the user for troubleshooting. In Athena, Calamares has been customized by configuring files inside /etc/calamares/branding/athena/ for setting colors, layout, slideshows and images.

In case it is needed to run Calamares by enabling the real-time logging in the terminal, we can run Calamares by the following command:

sudo calamares -D8 | sudo tee calamares.log

Anyway, Calamares always will store the installation logs in:

/root/.cache/calamares/session.log
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