Tasty calamares in Gentoo

First of all it’s nothing to eat. So what is it then? This is the introduction by upstream:

Calamares is an installer framework. By design it is very customizable, in order to satisfy a wide variety of needs and use cases. Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic. Calamares includes an advanced partitioning feature, with support for both manual and automated partitioning operations. It is the first installer with an automated “Replace Partition” option, which makes it easy to reuse a partition over and over for distribution testing. Got a Linux distribution but no system installer? Grab Calamares, mix and match any number of Calamares modules (or write your own in Python or C++), throw together some branding, package it up and you are ready to ship!

I have just added newest release version (1.1.2) to the tree and in my dev overlay a live version (9999). The underlaying technology stack is mainly Qt5, KDE Frameworks, Python3, YAML and systemd. It’s picked up and of course in evaluation process by several Linux distributions.

You may asking why i have added it to Gentoo then where we have OpenRC as default init system?! You are right at the moment it is not very useful for Gentoo. But for example Sabayon as a downstream of us will (maybe) use it for the next releases, so in the first place it is just a service for our downstreams.

The second reason, there is a discussion on gentoo-dev mailing list at the moment to reboot the Gentoo installer. Instead of creating yet another installer implementation, we have two potential ways to pick it up, which are not mutual exclusive:

1. Write modules to make it work with sysvinit aka OpenRC
2. Solve Bug #482702 – Provide alternative stage3 tarballs using sys-apps/systemd

Have fun!

[1] https://calamares.io/about/
[2] johu dev overlay
[3] gentoo-dev ml – Rebooting the Installer Project
[4] Bug #482702 – Provide alternative stage3 tarballs using sys-apps/systemd

9 thoughts on “Tasty calamares in Gentoo”

  1. Given that many live CDs, embedded linux, vm images are Gentoo based, this is an extremely welcome addition. I will use it for our VM images / PXE provisioning system at work. Currently our partitioning tool is bash script based and quite fragile. So I am looking forward to replacing that with something smarter.

  2. Regarding calamares and openrc, it works nicely except some minor stuff to sort out.
    Atm, calamares uses systemd as default, but disabling systemd stuff is easy by supplying the customized module configs.
    Perhaps openrc support will follow once calamares is feature complete.

  3. Right, I use calamares for the manjaro-openrc iso edition.
    Atm, we provide a preconfigured openrc image to install.

  4. I’ved used it on sabayon for some time.

    anyhow calamares requires systemd , but You can add scripts ,
    IE Chron job , on boot or on first login to kick out systemd and add back openrc support
    inject binary packages > /usr/portage/ during install.
    for a time thier was also Eleselect init in systemd love ,
    I’ve had to dig up some the files for necromancy-overlay (for desktop I mind not systemD) however the tool made it very easy to switch init sysvinit openrc, systemd
    (still digging kinda broken-ish per-forced system-D repo point has taken some time… to find)
    Sabayon has some nice config features , however its a lazy way to get gentoo, and on laptop hardware with quirky bios for a time was the only real way.
    fresh Gentoo iso for the year < till usb3 became more mainstream in kernels.

    mainly it gets me up and running and I don’t have to bash , git pull from a gazillion repos for configs etc i like.

    Gentoo-XFCE > myhdd without being a pest , a community bin repo, with delta-flags
    my make.conf my flags skip some delta’s etc. <>
    just enough to get a base install working in mere hours , then build updates from sources . just the inital configs i have no mind to tweak, however its is nice to just work enough for now.
    with stepson , GF , job , Grad classes , tinkering , overlay repoman , and other crap,
    a fast and mostly read gentoo Install would have been appreciative.
    however one of the packages can DB configs for roll back nice to have ?

    for security research Gentoo/Pentoo is awesome for testing new packages.

      1. binpkg-multi-instance

        Enable support for multiple binary package instances per ebuild. Having multiple instances is useful for a number of purposes, such as retaining builds that were built with different USE flags or linked against different versions of libraries. The location of any particular package within PKGDIR can be expressed as follows:

        not sure Sabayon’s Entropy can use this but for a Gentoo Public BIN repo , a nice option

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