About installers

greenjeans · 2026-02-11 01:32:04

My life is too short and my time too valuable to spend on the debian installer, i'd rather beat my junk with a ball-peen hammer, it's like trying to install win xp back in the day. Has anybody tried the Calamares installer? Is it any better?

Thank the gawds and fsmithred for Refracta-installer, without it I just wouldn't bother.

laurie_dev1 · 2026-02-11 05:42:54

By junk, i hope you mean old pc junk .
I dont mind the installer myself, one thing i would like when I used it would be to restart the installer after making a mistake.
So far all i can gather is you have to abort the installer and reboot and start again, especially with partitioning.

brocashelm · 2026-02-11 06:15:10

Couldn't Salix's live installer be ported to a Debian-based distro? I like that it's easy on the eyes with all the essentials on one screen to use to configure what you need, which cuts straight to the point.

Camtaf · 2026-02-11 09:37:51

Calamares installer?

MX Linux & antiX both use it, from memory, so should be easy enough to include.

ralph.ronnquist · 2026-02-11 11:19:02

Interesting. So your great idea is that someone else should go and actually do something because you think it appears to be an easy thing?

ceeslans · 2026-02-11 11:57:42

MX Linux & antiX both use it, from memory, so should be easy enough to include.

Don't think so. MX and antiX have been using the gazelle-installer for years

fsmithred · 2026-02-11 12:29:39

Calamares and I had disagreements about my partitioning scheme.
Last time I tried it, it needed around 125mb of software to work. That was a few years ago.

rations · 2026-02-11 14:35:16

Hi greenjeans, I've been working on calamares as I have friends that live a long way away who I told to install vuudo and they couldn't plus I had trouble installing vuudo as well. It might seem easy to all you clever folks who live and breath this stuff but not for people like me who don't know and don't want to know because it's just a computer. And reading the documentation is totally a no go area. If any of this helps go for it. I'm putting this together as more of a linux for dummies. Don't use the debian settings version just get the plain old calamares package. And yes as always I use chat bots to guide me. Like I've said before they aren't going away, learn how to use them to your advantage.

edit updated code is here https://sourceforge.net/projects/unoffi … box/files/ this is just theme stuff.

Last edited by rations (2026-02-14 18:46:09)

rations · 2026-02-11 14:44:53

There's a readme here on what I'm doing https://sourceforge.net/projects/unoffi … box/files/ I just made it to show you and It does not work yet, but i'll get there. Also like fsmithred said it's bloated but I think it would be good for vuudo

Tux beach

Devuan splash

greenjeans · 2026-02-11 16:03:28

FYI I didn't start this thread, I made a post that got moved. But I do appreciate the replies and insight.

rolfie · 2026-02-11 16:56:59

Isn't Calamares used on Devuan Live media? Or am I wrong here?

When I tried a Live once in a VM I figured that I couldn't install encrypted. A NoGo for me.

Edith: yes I was wrong. Calamares is used on Debian Live.

Last edited by rolfie (Yesterday 09:17:05)

golinux · 2026-02-11 17:45:37

rolfie . . . I think the Devuan live installer uses Simple Distro Kit which is a Dyne thing.

greenjeans · 2026-02-11 18:00:37

I'm always shocked when I hear people that have issues with the Refracta-Installer, for me it's literally the best install experience in 18 years of Linux, so simple and straightforward....10 minutes or less and i'm done, never had it fail on me. I honestly don't see how it could be made more user-friendly. The installer script itself is only 67 kb, I know it like the back of my hand and if I thought it could be made better I wouldn't hesitate to try things and report my findings to fsmithred for possible inclusion.

What about it is be-fuddling folks?

fsmithred · 2026-02-11 18:34:04

@rations: If you get calamares working, I'd like to know how to do it so I can try it again. Thanks.

Re: Simple Distro Kit - the SDK is for building the iso. Included in the iso is refractainstaller. Unlike refractasnapshot, which copies the running system to turn it into an iso file, SDK pulls packages from the repo and makes the iso. The difference is that the system made by SDK has never been booted.

greenjeans · 2026-02-11 20:17:18

Calamares and I had disagreements about my partitioning scheme.
Last time I tried it, it needed around 125mb of software to work. That was a few years ago.

Yeah I just checked, 147 mb on my machine, basically the QT kitchen sink and all the dishes. Yikes.

Devarch · 2026-02-12 11:38:29

Has anybody tried the Calamares installer?

Yes, I often install Debian than convert it to Devuan. The installer is GUI clean and works. Also Debian is 100% supported by ventoy.

delgado · 2026-02-13 21:56:52

I often install Debian than convert it to Devuan.

It can be a pleasure to apt-get purge systemd

steve_v · 2026-02-14 07:34:00

greenjeans wrote:

like trying to install win xp back in the day.

D-I is fine, it's always been fine. Preferrably the TUI "expert" mode.
The XP installer is also fine, provided period-appropriate hardware. 99% of problems installing XP, "back in the day" or otherwise, are really driver issues.

greenjeans wrote:

Has anybody tried the Calamares installer? Is it any better?

Than D-I? Not really, maybe for the easily-intimidated noob who just wants to click "next" a bunch of times. I's shinier and uses more mouse, but has fewer options.
Than refracta? Hell yes. Anything is better than that incoherent janky collection of hobby-project scripts and yad "UIs".

greenjeans wrote:

147 mb on my machine... Yikes.

Oh, the huge manatee. 150MB is 3/5 of sod all and completely irrelevant on any system capable of running the installed OS to begin with.

greenjeans wrote:

The installer script itself is only 67 kb

Cool. Now include the interpreter, all the external binaries it calls, and their respective GUI toolkits and libraries.
"script is ony [x]kb" is meaningless once you start pulling in most of GTK for a half-arsed UI, then call rsync and gparted to do all the real work.

Last edited by steve_v (2026-02-14 07:42:44)

Devarch · Yesterday 09:07:03

It can be a pleasure to apt-get purge systemd

greenjeans · Today 01:01:22

D-I is fine, it's always been fine. Preferrably the TUI "expert" mode.
The XP installer is also fine, provided period-appropriate hardware. 99% of problems installing XP, "back in the day" or otherwise, are really driver issues.

Yeah, provided you wanted to waste a couple of hours doing an install. Refracta-Installer is a brilliant piece of work that takes around 10 minutes to do, and so simple a caveman could do it. Truth is it could be even simpler as no installer (IMO) should have to do partitioning, running gparted before doing an install should be mandatory. And it's getting better with every iteration.

There is an elegance to brevity of code, that people forget in this day and age. " Oh dang, I have 5000 gb of ram and 1000 terabyte HD, so I should grow all programs and apps to be gigantic and consume 500 gb of ram minimum." Because ya know, rounded corners and all.

Last edited by greenjeans (Today 01:04:19)

rations · Today 04:26:10

@fsmithred I got this working thanks to your refractasnapshot and chatbots. I've read a lot of comments on here thanking you for refracta and I'll add my thanks to. It's great. So far on real hardware I've tried erase disk and replace a partition and they both worked. I haven't tried encrypted or manual partion.

Partitioning was a problem but the chat bots recommended the package partitionmanager and adding the user to disk. This worked. Calamares pulls in every package under the sun but not partitionmanager. Then unpackfs problems, had to point calamares to the correct location. Then more problems with bootloader, machine-id and some arch stuff that shouldn't be there. I used the latest calamares release for reference which shows you how to setup all the modules. I installed the release in the repo and it worked fine.

After installing your refractasnapshot-base, refractasnapshot-gui, calamares, partitionmanager, pkexec the chat bots scripts, install-config.sh, links all the stuff required, theming, polkit rules, exclude list etc and then build-iso.sh starts refractasnapshot. I have made a tar file here https://sourceforge.net/projects/unoffi … box/files/ so you can see. If you try it, from the directory execute the scripts and run them with sudo. I have just focused on getting calamares working so i would replace the exclude list and snapshot.conf with what you know, I am still learning this part.

@greenjeans I've used jamulus for a long time the other caveman use windows. They are really clever caveman, great musicians and can use software, like a daw really good. Using jamulus over 1800kms apart and bad internet every little bit of the setup counts. I kept telling them i tired vuudo and they should install it. As I said before never have I used a setup that worked as good for this purpose. Alsatune finds interface no problem and qjackctl for routing real time audio.

They tried it. After countless messages on how to just boot the live usb they were in, they liked it, wanted to install it, tired to install it multiple times and couldn't. Countless more messages trying to help them and no luck. It's like the blind leading the blind.

In my perfect cave we would all just use debian and the debian installer, and at the end just choose which init system to use.

steve_v · Today 04:35:11

provided you wanted to waste a couple of hours doing an install

If you're installing on a toaster perhaps. I'll take answering more questions to have more control any day, and the actual install process is the difference between invoking dpkg repeatedly to install .debs and just doing a straight copy from the squashfs / live media. On any competent machine the overhead of using the packaging tools as intended is minimal.

running gparted before doing an install should be mandatory

Gparted is bloat, like any other GUI. I use parted, fdisk, or sfdisk if I want to pipe in a saved layout.
Chuck Norris edits the partition table in binary, with ed, which is also a valid approach. IMO.

brevity of code

Doesn't count when the "brief" code is a script and all the heavy-lifting is being done by external applications though. The same quantity of code spread out is... Still the same quantity of code, and probably slower due to all the forking and context-switching going on.

greenjeans · Today 18:38:51

Gparted is bloat, like any other GUI. I use parted, fdisk, or sfdisk if I want to pipe in a saved layout.
Chuck Norris edits the partition table in binary, with ed, which is also a valid approach. IMO.

I don't like bloat either, I would argue that most of my experiments are anti-bloat in nature from the get-go.

But we are talking about normies here when you think about distributing your software, and as @rations already said, normies have some issues with things and are not prone to be CLI-savvy, GUI's is what they want. Gparted works fine in limited use and folks can understand it.

I like a 10 minute install. I like knowing exactly what i'm getting.

In the end it sounds like you're making an argument that Refracta-Installer needs a better GUI? While at the same time eschewing GUI's in general and speaking of your preference for CLI apps, it's confusing me.

I need to make a video showing the basics of a simple install using Refracta-Installer, my gawd it's so simple I just don't see how it could be confusing unless folks are just asking it to do all the things, which admittedly I have not tested them all, I just know my way works.

What would make RI better? A more conventional UI rather than yad dialogs? What is it that people have a hard time with?

Fsmithred's a pretty laid back guy, he might take some suggestions well when he has time, keep in mind he's busy as hell like all the devs.

I'd be willing to at least try and mock up an updated GUI for it, maybe we need a fork of it for the less tech-savvy that explains things more and simplifies some things.

fsmithred · Today 20:15:48

@rations,

I spent a few hours this morning playing with calamares installer. At first it would not let me enter a password for the new user. I had to add cracklib_runtime and reinstall libcrack2. Also had to decrease the minimum password length. When I rebooted into the installed system, it would not let me log in until I finally tried user:user (the original user:password in my test iso).

The problem is that it's set for debian-live which does not have a pre-configured user. The user gets created on the fly by live-config. But devuan live isos are made with a pre-configured user and home directory. I tried disabling and even removing user.conf, and it still gives me a user setup screen that does not set up a user. I would need to rearrange the build process of the iso to do it the debian-live way.

Another problem that I haven't solved yet is that it doesn't install grub. I had to do that in chroot from the running live system.

Other things I changed:
Reduced minimum disk size from 15 GiB to 6 or 8 GiB.
Set the systemd-machine-id to false inside the module, but kept the settings for dbus-machine-id.

@greenjeans,
What would make refractainstaller better is a cleaner logic for setting up multiple partitions and some other code improvements. I don't much care about any gui - I just use the cli versions of snapshot and installer.

Edit: Somewhere on youtube is a good video of using refractainstaller. Might possibly have been made by miyolinux or maybe he found it and linked it. That was a few years ago.

greenjeans · Today 20:41:18

@greenjeans,
What would make refractainstaller better is a cleaner logic for setting up multiple partitions and some other code improvements. I don't much care about any gui - I just use the cli versions of snapshot and installer.

And i'm perfectly happy with the yad version, especially with my purty dialog tweaks.

But i'd sure like to see people not getting frustrated with it and giving up. And i'm really leaning towards the idea in general to remove partitioning duties from installer programs, it's just gotten too complicated with encryption and EFI stuff.

Speaking of which, @rations did your friends possibly try to install Vuu-do on an efi-only machine? That would explain their issues as Vuu-do is not uefi-enabled.

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About installers

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Re: About installers

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