The release of the Archinstall 2.4 installer has been published, which has been included as an option in the installation ISO images of Arch Linux since April 2021. Archinstall operates in console mode and can be used instead of the default manual installation mode of the distribution. There is a separate development of a graphical installation interface, but it is not included in the Arch Linux installation images and has not been updated for over two years.
Archinstall provides both dialog (guided) and automated modes. In dialog mode, the user is sequentially asked questions covering essential settings and actions from the installation guide. The automated mode allows the use of scripts for deploying standard configurations. The installer also supports installation profiles, such as the 'desktop' profile to select a desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, Awesome) and install the necessary packages, or the 'webserver' and 'database' profiles for selecting and installing web server and DBMS components.
Among the changes in the new version:
- A new menu system has been proposed, translated to use the simple-term-menu library.
- The set of colors available for highlighting log entries sent through archinstall.log() has been expanded.
- Profiles for installing custom environments bspwm and sway, as well as a profile for multimedia installation, have been added. server pipewire.
- Support for localization and the ability to connect translations for all displayed data has been provided.
- Improved support for the Btrfs file system. An option for enabling compression in Btrfs and an option for disabling copy-on-write mode (nodatacow) have been added.
- Expanded capabilities for managing disk partitions.
- The ability to simultaneously define multiple network card configurations has been provided.
- Tests based on pytest have been added.
- The function archinstall.run_pacman() for invoking the pacman package manager has been added, as well as the function archinstall.package_search() for searching packages.
- The function .enable_multilib_repository() has been added to archinstall.Installer() to enable multilib.
- Functions for loading and saving settings (archinstall.load_config and archinstall.save_config) have been added.
- The function archinstall.list_timezones() has been added to display a list of time zones.
- The new window manager qtile, written in Python, has been implemented.
- Functions for adding systemd, grub, and efistub boot loaders have been added.
- User interaction scripts have been split into several files and moved from archinstall/lib/user_interaction.py to the archinstall/lib/user_interaction/ directory.
Source: opennet.ru
