Cutefish Calamares

Calamares is a distribution-independent system installer, with an advanced partitioning feature for both manual and automated partitioning operations. Calamares is designed to be customizable by distribution maintainers without need for cumbersome patching, thanks to third party branding and external modules support.

Target Audience

Calamares is a Linux installer; users who install Linux on a computer will hopefully use it just once, to install their Linux distribution. Calamares is not a "ready to use" application: distributions apply a huge amount of customisation and configuration to Calamares, and the target audience for this repository is those distributions, and the people who make those Linux distro's.

Calamares has some generic user documentation for end-users, but most of what we have is for distro developers.

Getting Calamares

Clone Calamares from GitHub. The default branch is called calamares.

git clone https://github.com/calamares/calamares.git

Calamares is a KDE-Frameworks and Qt-based, C++17, CMake-built application. The dependencies are explained in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributing to Calamares

Calamares welcomes PRs. New issues are welcome, too. There are both the Calamares core repository (this one), and an extensions repository (Calamares extensions).

Contributions to code, modules, documentation, the wiki and the website are all welcome. There is more information in the CONTRIBUTING.md file.

Join the Conversation

GitHub Issues are one place for discussing Calamares if there are concrete problems or a new feature to discuss.

Regular Calamares development chit-chat happens in a Matrix room, #calamares:kde.org. The conversation is bridged with IRC on Libera.Chat. Responsiveness is best during the day in Europe, but feel free to idle. If you use IRC, DO NOT ask-and-leave. Keep that chat window open because it can easily take a few hours for someone to notice a message. Matrix is persistent, and we'll see your message eventually.

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