Calamares installer does not work on UEFI

[nilzon]

Sorry to learn that the highly anticipated new MAUI 2 now ships with the Calamares installer(?). Apparently this installer does not handle UEFI install correctly, however first impression is that it does. But after taking a look after installation in the 'Root/etc/fstab'-file, one can see that it is not configured as it should be (subvol=@ and subvol=@home is missing). Also on my system, my previously installed Windows partition was not listed at boot. If you google a bit on "Calamares installer" and UEFI, there is a lot of comments about this, so it is a well known problem. It would have been much better if the installer that ships with Ubuntu, Mint, Neon... and so on also had been used in Maui 2 (as I beleve MAUI 1 was). This installer is pretty straight forward and handles UEFI (and dual boot) as it should, without any hassle.

For now, MAUI 2 is sadly a dead end on my system.

(If anybody has a solution, I will be glad to know)

/T Nilzon

[leszek]

As a workaround you can still install the ubiquity installer from the live session.

As for calamares.
subvol= indicates that you are trying to install on a btrfs filesystem I assume ?

[nilzon]

As a workaround you can still install the ubiquity installer from the live session.

As for calamares.
subvol= indicates that you are trying to install on a btrfs filesystem I assume ?

OK, thanks for the tip about ubiquity. I will try that.

[nilzon]

As a workaround you can still install the ubiquity installer from the live session.

As for calamares.
subvol= indicates that you are trying to install on a btrfs filesystem I assume ?

Have now tried (two times) to install MAUI with the 'ubiquity' installer as you suggested. It crashes half way in the process during install. And yes, it is a btrfs-file system.

This is no good...


/ T Nilzon

[wonder]

If you have a dual boot, use update grub.
After install maui 2, I sudo update-grub and then, appears and works fine dual boot (I also use UEFI mode).

[teo--]

Sorry to learn that the highly anticipated new MAUI 2 now ships with the Calamares installer(?). Apparently this installer does not handle UEFI install correctly, however first impression is that it does. But after taking a look after installation in the 'Root/etc/fstab'-file, one can see that it is not configured as it should be (subvol=@ and subvol=@home is missing). Also on my system, my previously installed Windows partition was not listed at boot. If you google a bit on "Calamares installer" and UEFI, there is a lot of comments about this, so it is a well known problem. It would have been much better if the installer that ships with Ubuntu, Mint, Neon... and so on also had been used in Maui 2 (as I beleve MAUI 1 was). This installer is pretty straight forward and handles UEFI (and dual boot) as it should, without any hassle.

For now, MAUI 2 is sadly a dead end on my system.

(If anybody has a solution, I will be glad to know)

/T Nilzon

Hello Nilzon, I'm the Calamares maintainer.

First of all, I'm very sorry you had a bad experience. Calamares is a recent addition to Maui, and both myself and the Maui team are working hard to make it work well while avoiding certain pitfalls and difficulties we encountered with Ubiquity. I hope you can provide some details to help us improve Calamares for everyone.
So, from what I gather, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you are reporting the following two issues.

1) When installing Calamares on a btrfs root, you expected Calamares to create a subvolume for /home, and add both the root and the /home subvolumes as fstab entries. This was not the case, and btrfs was treated like a traditional filesystem, with a single volume, no subvolume for /home and a single fstab entry.
Is this what happened? Was this with one of the automated partitioning modes, or with manual partitioning?

2) After performing an install on UEFI, the GRUB bootloader is installed, but it removes the previous Windows entry, only allowing to boot Maui. Is this what happened for you, was booting Maui possible at all? If that's the case, update-grub might fix this. Can you please confirm if update-grub is useful in this case?

[nilzon]

Sorry to learn that the highly anticipated new MAUI 2 now ships with the Calamares installer(?). Apparently this installer does not handle UEFI install correctly, however first impression is that it does. But after taking a look after installation in the 'Root/etc/fstab'-file, one can see that it is not configured as it should be (subvol=@ and subvol=@home is missing). Also on my system, my previously installed Windows partition was not listed at boot. If you google a bit on "Calamares installer" and UEFI, there is a lot of comments about this, so it is a well known problem. It would have been much better if the installer that ships with Ubuntu, Mint, Neon... and so on also had been used in Maui 2 (as I beleve MAUI 1 was). This installer is pretty straight forward and handles UEFI (and dual boot) as it should, without any hassle.

For now, MAUI 2 is sadly a dead end on my system.

(If anybody has a solution, I will be glad to know)

/T Nilzon

Hello Nilzon, I'm the Calamares maintainer.

First of all, I'm very sorry you had a bad experience. Calamares is a recent addition to Maui, and both myself and the Maui team are working hard to make it work well while avoiding certain pitfalls and difficulties we encountered with Ubiquity. I hope you can provide some details to help us improve Calamares for everyone.
So, from what I gather, and please correct me if I'm wrong, you are reporting the following two issues.

1) When installing Calamares on a btrfs root, you expected Calamares to create a subvolume for /home, and add both the root and the /home subvolumes as fstab entries. This was not the case, and btrfs was treated like a traditional filesystem, with a single volume, no subvolume for /home and a single fstab entry.
Is this what happened? Was this with one of the automated partitioning modes, or with manual partitioning?

2) After performing an install on UEFI, the GRUB bootloader is installed, but it removes the previous Windows entry, only allowing to boot Maui. Is this what happened for you, was booting Maui possible at all? If that's the case, update-grub might fix this. Can you please confirm if update-grub is useful in this case?

Hi, and thanks for your reply. As for your comments:

1) Your description is correct, and it was manual partitioning.

2) Your description is correct, only Maui booted (but with the wrong btrfs partitioning as mentioned above). I did not try update-grub.

/ T Nilzon

[wonder]

2) Your description is correct, only Maui booted (but with the wrong btrfs partitioning as mentioned above). I did not try update-grub.

/ T Nilzon

In my case, the same, only Maui booted, but after, I run update-grub and fix and appears all operating systems in the grub.

[teo--]

Thank you both for your replies.

I have managed to reproduce both reported issues, and I have added them to the Calamares bugtracker (https://calamares.io/bugs/).

For full Btrfs support we depend on KPMcore, so this won't be trivial, and I'm still thinking about what can be done in the meantime.
As for GRUB not picking up Windows, this is a critical issue caused by os-prober not working under chroot. I plan on fixing this with the next release.

Thanks again for testing, and my apologies for the inconvenience.

[wonder]

Thanks at you and a pleasure to contribute / help.