Parted Magic

# News

2/11/08 - Parted Magic 2.0 is finally released! See the changelog for most of the small details. I'll talk about the cool stuff most people will care about here. GParted has been forked to VisParted to add features GParted doesn't have. VisParted can read and write volume labels for most supported file systems. Point and click disk wiping was added. Please be careful because you will not get the files back if a mistake is made. When you mount a partition with VisParted a window of Thunar will open at the selected location as well as mounting it. Desktop icons are automatically created for mounting CDROM/DVDs and USB flash drives. The boot menu is all new and all the boot options can be displayed by hitting <F1>. Networking and Firefox were added to surf the web for help and to view the online documents. A simple 7zip package management system was created so users can add their own stuff with little effort. The entire system has been revamped with a unique booting system without changing the basic look and feel of past versions. Be sure the look at the syslinux.cfg because GRUB will no longer work with 1.9 stanza.

Parted Magic has been out for a year and 2 months now...

12/22/07 - New wiki website!!! Hope it works and looks better for everybody.

10/26/07 - Parted Magic 1.9 Updated packages: linux-2.6.23, ntfsprogs-2.0.0, ntfs-3g-1.913, isomaster-1.1, conky-1.4.7, busybox-1.7.0, jfsutils-1.1.12, testdisk-6.8, partimage-0.6.6, parted-1.8.8, fuse-2.7.0, mtools-3.9.11, xfsprogs_2.9.3-1, lshw-B.02.11. I added all i386 keymaps from kbd. There is a label changing GUI for reiserfs, ntfs, ext2, ext3, xfs, and jfs. A few people asked for photorec and it was added. I did some hacking on GParted and you can create hfs+ file systems directly from GParted now. Added support to name the location of the pmagic squashfs in the syslinux.cfg. Some other other bug fixes and script changes as well.

7/25/07 - Parted Magic 1.8 is out and it has some new features and many updated programs. We added dd_rhelp, sdparm, mbr, and xfburn for starters. Updated programs: linux-2.6.22, e2fsprogs-1.40.2, ntfs-3g-1.710, dd_rescue-1.13, ddrescue-1.5, leafpad-0.8.11, file-4.21, testdisk-6.7, mdadm-2.6.1, pciutils-2.2.5, syslinux-3.51, isomaster-1.0, hdparm-7.4, xfsprogs_2.8.21-1, busybox-1.5.1, and usbutils-0.72. All menus are bypassed now. After the syslinux menu, it boots to the desktop without any other interruptions. You can now create the LiveUSB from the LiveCD by using our new 'USB Operations' program. All USB devices are detected and the user can simply pick the target drive from a dynamically-created list. We have had several suggestions to add a "find" frontend, but we couldn't "find" a light-weight solution. To fix this request, we made our own and you can find it in the Utilities Menu. Mounting local drives to save files has been done with our 'Mount Utility', and we vastly updated this program. All partitions, USB drives, CD/DVD devices, and other media are detected and displayed into a "check-box" style list. That means you can mount as many (or all) devices in the list by simply checking the boxes and pressing OK. To make it more user-friendly, we labeled each partition with its size, file system, distribution, and mounted state. CDROM and DVD drives are labeled by manufacturer and mounted state as well. Floppy drives have been a pain to use in the past and we corrected this with a new program called 'Floppy Operations'. The floppy drives are detected and added to a list like the 'Mount Utility' and you are given the option to format or mount the floppy. When mounted, 'Floppy Operations' opens in a Thunar window just like the 'Mount Utility'. Some Windows users and Linux noobs are having problems saving screenshots and other files like the GParted Save Details. We made a new utility for this too. 'Session File Saver' is an automated routine to save session files to an alternate location such as a hard drive or USB drive. It gathers files created by GParted and the other Parted Magic utilities into a zip file and saves them to a selected location. We also added the French keymap and some applications are now displayed in French.

The Parted Magic team worked hard on this release and we hope you like it.

5/21/07 - Parted Magic 1.7 released. We reworked syslinux to use the vesamenu.c32 menu and added xarchiver, conky, hpafs, and fiesta. The kernel was also upgraded to linux-2.6.21. Most of the work done this time has been code clean-ups and the Parted Magic Documention. Some of the core programs like Xorg and ntfs-3g have been upgraded to the latest version as well. Look at the ChangeLog if you need to see more.

3/12/07 - A new Parted Magic and a new baby girl. Monday my wife gave birth to our 3rd child, Scarlet Agatha Verner. Surprisingly enough, I was able to get some work done this week. When I wasn't washing dishes or getting the other two kids ready for school, I was holding the baby with my left arm and typing with my right. :^)

Parted Magic 1.6: The system boots faster because I did some work with the udev rules. I added some man pages for most of the CLI programs. The 'hard drive boot' can now find the drive where pmagic file is stored and some fail-safes were added. I made a new utility called 'Mount utility' that should make it easier to mount local drives. If you type "skip" and then options "toram" and/or "xvesa" at the boot prompt the extra boot options menu is skipped. Check out the ChangeLog for more details.

2/12/07 - Parted Magic 1.5 has some fairly large changes. In "extra boot options" menu you can now undo options and it won't kernel panic if the CD isn't found or you type in the wrong drive. Instead it brings you to an error window and cleanly reboots the system. The graphical configuration was rewritten from scratch. It should be more automated, you can undo options, auto detect, edit with nano, and if it fails it brings you back to the menu. If you save your xorg.conf in the root of the iso or usb the graphical menu is skipped altogether. isomaster was added to the help menu so you can remaster the iso from Parted Magic.

1/26/07 - Parted Magic 1.4 is out and now uses Xfce-4.4.0 desktop. A bunch of other fairly big usability issues were fixed too.

1/20/07 - Jason Vasquez joined the project to do testing, suggestions, nit-picking, and basic development. Most of the new usability improvements were his ideas.

1/17/07 - Parted Magic 1.3 was released to fix a lib oops I made with testdisk. Busybox was updated to busybox-1.3.1 and ntfs-3g to ntfs-3g-0.20070116-BETA.

1/14/07 - Parted Magic 1.2 now has zfs and ocfs2-tools. The kernel was also upgraded to Linux-2.6.19.2 and you can now resize Vista partitions with ntfsresize from ntfsprogs-200701102356. I also did some minor fixes on the shutdown menu.

1/8/07 - Parted Magic 1.1 is out and it has some major overhauls. The booting system and the "Extra Boot Options" menus have new features and were almost rewritten from scratch. Xfce panel was replaced by pypanel, so the flickering toolbar thing is gone. A bunch of nifty console programs were added for the CLI guys. The overall look of X windows is absolutely wonderful now. There is alot of new stuff to check out!

12/25/06 - Merry Christmas! This is the first release of Parted Magic. E-mail feedback to here until I get the forum up and going.

Page last modified on February 10, 2008, at 05:21 PM