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Deploy Guide
Calamares is designed to be thoroughly configurable and suitable for a wide range of use cases, but it is not an end-user application, nor is its configuration something end-users should be concerned about. Deployers of Calamares -- that is, distro's and OEMs who use Calamares for system installation -- should be configuring the application.
The primary documentation for Calamares configuration is in the source code and the configuration files themselves. The source code contains two overview files:
This guide contains high-level documentation on configuration and deployment but for details you will have to consult the configuration files for individual parts of Calamares.
Calamares is designed to be thoroughly configurable and suitable for a wide range of use cases.
End users are not supposed to deal with configuration issues, so all configuration is done through YAML configuration files. The files shipped with Calamares are sample configuration files, which also contain the documentation for the settings in each file.
See the configuration guide for more details.
Distributions are strongly urged to package configuration files
separately from Calamares itself, and to install them in /etc/calamares.
It is not recommended to edit or patch the configuration files
included with Calamares for production use -- they are examples.
Starting with Calamares 3.2.2, the sample configuration files are no
longer installed by default (the option INSTALL_CONFIG is now switched
off).
Calamares supports so-called "OEM mode", which can be used when an OEM installs an image to a piece of hardware (e.g. a laptop) where the installed image boots to a desktop where the user (e.g. the person who has purchased the laptop) can complete installation by customizing the installation (e.g. by picking another username).
An OEM can use Calamares in two different situations: for creating an image before the device is delivered to the customer, and for configuring the device (by the customer) after it is delivered. These are documented in the next two sections.
All OEM modes are enabled by setting the dont-chroot key in
settings.conf to the value true.
Calamares follows the desktop styling if the Qt Platform does so. There is additional styling which can be applied through the Branding module and stylesheets.
The Branding configuration sets a few style parameters -- window behavior and colors and icons. Using only that file, Calamares will largely follow the desktop styling.
It is possible to style Calamares at a much more fine-grained level using Qt Stylesheets. These are basically CSS styles where the CSS selectors apply to widget classes or specific widgets.
An overview of Qt Stylesheets is here.
If a branding component ships a stylesheet.qss next to the branding.desc
file, that stylesheet will be loaded and used by Calamares.
Class selectors can be applied in Calamares, and the following stylesheet makes all the combo-boxes in the application green:
QComboBox { background: green; }
QComboBox QAbstractItemView { background: lightgreen; }
Individual widgets can also be styled by using their name as CSS id.
The example stylesheet.qss lists many top-level
widgets that can be styled, such as:
- mainApp The top-level window
- sidebarApp The application's sidebar (progress tree, on the left)
- logoApp The application logo (top-left) Some modules also have named widgets, such as the partition and license modules.
For debugging purposes and for trying out styles, the debug window can be used. The tools tab contains (as of Calamares 3.2.9) these buttons:
- reload stylesheet which does what it says: reloads the stylesheet file and applies it to the application. This can be used to test changes in the stylesheet without re-starting Calamares.
-
widget tree which dumps the names of all the widgets in the application
to the log file (usually
session.log, or to standard output). This can help to find out the name of a particular widget which you wish to style.
See article: AppImage building.
See article: LUKS deployment advice.
These are (historically) documented known "gotchas" when deploying Calamares. Typically they are configuration issues and bugs in external tools used by Calamares during system installation.
Known issues have moved to a separate file.