Releasing version 12 and a roadmap

Agama development goes on at good pace and, approximately one month after our latest blog post, we have more news for you. Not only a new version of Agama with a completely refreshed user interface and other significant changes, but also some information about the future.

New visual appearance

Let's start with the most obvious change introduced at Agama 12. You may know that the Agama web interface relies on the Patternfly framework, the same design system used by Cockpit. In this version of Agama, we migrated to the latest major version of Patternfly (v6), which brings several improvements and quite noticeable visual changes. Moreover, we took the opportunity to align with the SUSE branding guidelines regarding aspects like typography, colors, etc.

More than ever, in this case a picture is worth a thousand words.

But the changes on the user interface go far beyond cosmetic aspects and general usability improvements. On top of that, some sections went through an overhaul.

Revamped Storage section

In previous Agama releases, the section of the user interface used to configure the storage devices (partitions, LVM, etc.) was very powerful. It allowed to create complex setups over single or multiple disks based on partitions and/or LVM volume groups, to use hard disks directly formatted (without partitions), to reuse existing partitions or volume groups (optionally re-formatting them) and much more. But it had some problems.

On the one hand, most users failed to discover how to access to all those features. The interface was not self-explanatory enough. On the other hand, we were struggling to find a way to add more functionality (especially software RAIDs) in a consistent way. To make things a bit more problematic, the configuration generated by that user interface was not fully aligned with the usual mindset of our users currently relying on profile-based configuration (ie. unattended installation).

Thus, a couple of months ago, we decided to change the approach of that user interface. But it took us some time to reach a point in which the new interface is functional enough for basic configurations.

The new section is still far from its final form and also from providing all the possibilities of the previous interface. So expect significant updates on future releases, like bringing back the support to define LVM volume groups. Meanwhile, you can read about its existing and future capabilities at the corresponding section of the Agama user documentation.

Changes in authentication management

Security is a topic that demands constant re-evaluation. When it comes to a Linux system, one of the first aspects of security is the way to organize users, privileges and authentication. SUSE and openSUSE have been reconsidering lately how to approach that and it seems clear that the traditional role of the root user and the default configuration of sudo are going to change in future releases of SLE and openSUSE Leap.

Agama 12 already takes the first steps to adapt to the new situation, removing the mandatory step to set a password for the root user and introducing a new Authentication section instead of the former Users one.

This is just the first iteration for a part of Agama that will receive several improvements regarding usability and wording in upcoming releases.

Post-partitioning script

Not all changes at Agama 12 affect the user interface. Unattended installation also received a bunch of improvements, including the ability to execute scripts right after setting up the storage layout.

As you may know, both AutoYaST and Agama offer the possibility to specify custom scripts that can be executed at several points of the installation workflow. In previous versions Agama already offered the so-called pre-installation scripts, post-installation scripts and init scripts. But now Agama 12 offers also post-partitioning scripts that can be used, among many other things, to deploy configuration files before the packages are installed, modifying with that the behavior of the scripts included at RPM packages.

Information about AutoYaST compatibility

And talking about unattended installation, we cannot forget one of the main features of Agama - its backwards compatibility with AutoYaST. Such a compatibility is not perfect and never will be, due to the difference in scope between both Agama (focused on installation) and AutoYaST (a more general configuration tool).

Now when Agama reads an AutoYaST profile it informs the user about the sections that will be ignored, making a difference between those sections that will be supported soon by Agama and those that are considered to be out of its scope even for the future.

The report can be disabled by specifying agama.ay_check=0 as a boot parameter.

We also took the opportunity to update the corresponding information at the AutoYaST compatibility reference document. What is even better, we introduced some mechanisms to generate such a document based on the same information used by Agama to generate the compatibility report during execution, so we can make sure the documentation is in sync with the actual implementation.

Improvements at the Live ISO

Most users will execute Agama using the default installation media for SUSE or openSUSE distributions, which we unsurprisingly call Agama-live (since it is just a live Linux system running Agama).

Although the installation media is relatively independent from Agama itself, we take every Agama release as an opportunity to announce some of the latest improvements. In this occasion that includes some tweaks to the underlying window manager (IceWM), less aggressive settings for both power saving and the screensaver and the ability to open a terminal emulator by pressing ctrl+alt+t.

Find the latest version of the openSUSE Agama Live ISO image, including Agama 12, at its usual location.

A glance into the future

This time we will use the release of Agama 12 as an opportunity to announce something else. We decided to add a Roadmap section to the Agama home page.

They say "plans are useless, but planning is indispensable". That may be the case of the Agama roadmap. We have a clear goal in the mid term, but we are constantly re-evaluating our priorities and the next steps to be taken. As such, you can expect that document to be updated often. Do not carve it into stone!

See you soon!

As you can see in the mentioned roadmap, we plan to release Agama 13 by the end of March. And of course that will mean another blog post for you to enjoy the YaST Team adventures.

Meanwhile, you can also find us at SUSECON 2025, which will take place at Orlando (USA). Part of the team will be there to meet our beloved users and conduct a couple of sessions about Agama.

If you cannot be there in person, you can of course meet us at our usual online channels, like the Agama project at GitHub and the #yast channel at Libera.chat.

Have a lot of fun!