So if I'm looking at the Neon build farm webpage correctly, the Calamares version is at 2.4.5 while they have released 3.1 so far, but nevemind.

I wanted to ask whether the Calamares installer has an option to NOT install the bootloader? Anyone recently installed dev unstable edition alongside other OS?

Just curious because I have on my main home PC's disk other OSes, main one being elementary OS and using its grub installation for multiboot with it and Win10, along with Fedora and Neon dev unstable.

On my laptop I have, again elementary OS as main install using its GRUB as bootloader, along with Win10 and I want to try installing latest dev unstable edition ISO to see if anything new fangled in the install experience

So I tried compiling the 3.1 source and run it via sudo It doesn't list my disk - I guess because I am booted into a running OS and the disk is mounted already.

So tried looking at the "partition" module source code , bit concerned that if EFI is enabled then the bootloader UI widget is hidden, not sure if that means it will auto-install bootloader (and overwrite my preferred GRUB installation) or skip it.

Anyways, I am used to restoring my grub install, recent installation of ubuntu artful daily live also did the same sneaky thing

This isn't really the right forum for Calamares questions; it possibly is for KDE Neon questions, though. KDE Neon developer edition / unstable comes with Calamares 3.1.0. You may be looking at an older KDE Neon release, or a stable one.

Mounted disks are not shown; this is intentional.

You seem to be asking if there is a feature / checkbox in the bootloader installation module (or the partitioning module, or whatever) to *not* install a bootloader because you've already got one. .. and you'd like to have a bootloader / partitioning module with that feature in KDE neon, since you're installing to a physical disk with other installations. I'm not convinced that makes sense in any but the most specialized of circumstances: why not plug in a 16GB thumb drive and install to that (including bootloader)? In any case, the right place for this part of the discussion is in a Calamares issue on GitHub.

Thank you for posting. I saw your very recent "Calamares Testing" blog post - good to hear from the maintainer himself Should I post comments here: https://github.com/calamares/calamares/issues/517 ?

You got my question right, but are you saying people who "dual boot" (or multiboot) are very specialised? I guess most common scenario might be a dual boot with Windows and ONE other linux distro.

But here I am "quint" booting.... Win10, elementary OS, Neon dev unstable edition (installed many moons ago), Fedora and Ubuntu.

I believe the ubiquity installer has an option to *not* install a bootloader, or at the very least to install in the partition itself and not into the "MBR", so that saves some hassle of restoring my preferred GRUB installation again and again.

Would be nice to have this option to avoid installing bootloader in Calamares too.

Oooh, I do see the following code in https://github.com/calamares/calamares/ ... l.cpp#L109

Code: Select all

        // Create "don't install bootloader" item
        appendRow(
            createBootLoaderItem( tr( "Do not install a boot loader" ), QString(), false )
        );


I guess it populates the "Install bootloader to:" dropdown. Anyways I'm downloading latest Neon dev unstable edition ISO to try it out for real. I had wanted to save my precious Internet bandwidth but what the heck

Just an update that one of the Calamares contributors posted this note in the github ticket: https://github.com/calamares/calamares/ ... -309513190

Unfortunately, this setting is supported only for MBR installations, not EFI. EFI installations currently always install a boot loader.

https://github.com/calamares/calamares/ ... e.cpp#L966

So that is why when I tried the latest KDE Neon dev unstable ISO the bootloader option did not show up on my system. I guess a "workaround" is to not set the EFI partition mount and that prevents the bootloader from installing.

Calamares changes bootloader choices according to the installation procedure:



It is similar to Manual. When displaying "Do not install a boot loader" please specify the mount point first.