The release of the Archinstall 2.4 installer has been published, which since April 2021 has been included as an option in Arch Linux installation iso images. Archinstall runs in console mode and can be used instead of the distribution's default manual installation mode. There is a separate implementation of the installation GUI implementation, but it is not included in the Arch Linux installation images and has not been updated for more than two years.
Archinstall provides interactive (guided) and automated modes of operation. In the interactive mode, the user is asked sequentially questions covering the basic settings and actions from the installation guide. In automated mode, it is possible to use scripts to deploy typical configurations. The installer also supports installation profiles, for example, the βdesktopβ profile for selecting a desktop (KDE, GNOME, Awesome) and installing packages necessary for its operation, or the βwebserverβ and βdatabaseβ profiles for selecting and installing web server and DBMS stuffing .
Among the changes in the new version:
- A new menu system has been proposed, translated to use the simple-term-menu library.
- Expanded the set of colors available for highlighting log entries sent via archinstall.log().
- Added profiles for installing bspwm and sway user environments, as well as a profile for installing pipewire multimedia server.
- Provided support for localization and connection of translations for all data displayed on the screen.
- Improved support for the Btrfs file system. Added an option to enable compression in Btrfs and an option to disable copy-on-write mode (nodatacow).
- Expanded options for managing disk partitions.
- Possibility of simultaneous definition of several configurations of network cards is provided.
- Added tests based on pytest.
- Added the archinstall.run_pacman() function to call the pacman package manager, and the archinstall.package_search() function to search for packages.
- Added .enable_multilib_repository() function to archinstall.Installer() to enable multilib.
- Added functions for loading and saving settings (archinstall.load_config and archinstall.save_config)
- Added archinstall.list_timezones() function to show list of timezones.
- The new window manager is qtile, written in Python.
- Added functions to add systemd, grub and efistub bootloaders.
- The 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