The Archinstall 2.8.1 text-mode installer for the popular Arch Linux distribution was released today as a hefty update introducing initial LVM support and many other improvements.
Archinstall 2.8.1 is the first release of Arch Linux’s installer to offer LVM support, which will be available when choosing a default partitioning layout. While you can now install Arch Linux with an LVM partition layout, the devs note that LVM support is considered experimental at this stage.
Apart from LVM support, the new Arch Linux installer also introduces a Finnish translation, adds a few more applications to the Hyprland desktop profile, renames the “Kde” profile to “KDE Plasma” / “Plasma”, changes the default root partition size from 20GB up to 50GB maximum, sets root partition type as GUID, and uses VCS as pyparted version lock.
Other noteworthy changes in this release include using the current keyboard layout instead of the US layout by default, updating the mkinitcpio.conf hooks for upstream consistency, skipping devices that raise a DiskException and log the exception message, and adding better mypy coverage.
Another interesting change in Archinstall 2.8.1 is the initial work on implementing a new menu-based interface using curses, which should probably make installing Arch Linux a little more attractive for newcomers. This will implement things like displaying the preview menu on either bottom, right, or top, multi-column menus, as well as overlay windows.
Other than that, the new Archinstall release fixes various bugs to improve the locale generator, handling of missing free spaces and deleted partitions, handling of unknown device/partition types, null fs_type of partition, and unmounting of all partitions.
Several core functions have been refactored, including suggest_single_disk_layout(), format(), and umount() for a better and more reliable installation. It also converts the partition path string to a Path object.
For more details, check out the changelog on the project’s GitHub page, from where you can also download Archinstall 2.8.1 if you fancy compiling from sources. But that shouldn’t be the case because Archinstall 2.8.1 is already available in Arch Linux’s stable repositories and can be downloaded and installed with a single command.
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