New In KDE Partition Manager 1.1 (I): Mount Management
This is part 1 of a (hopefully) multipart sequence of entries presenting some of the new features of the soon-to-be-finished KDE Partition Manager 1.1.
One of the most requested features after KDE Partition Manager's initial release has been that users asked for a way to modify mount points from within the application. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I would not have seen this feature to be in the immediate scope of a partition managing application. But, the user is king after all, and thus this will indeed be possible in KDE Partition Manager 1.1.
Each partition will have a new menu option to get to this mount point management dialog:
In this screenshot we're just editing the mount point for a partition "/dev/sdd1" which has an ext3 file system. The mount point for this partition has been set to "/mnt/tmp".
It's possible to pick how the partition (and its file system) is to be identified by the system -- either by its device node (the classic to warm any long-bearded hacker's heart, e.g "/dev/sdd1"), by UUID (the cryptic, modern and most reliable method) or by file system label (convenient and easily readable, but not recommended). It's important to note that mounting by symlink (e.g. "/dev/disk/by-id/xxx") is not supported. Existing mounts that use this pattern will be converted to ordinary device node mounts once KDE Partition Manager writes the new /etc/fstab file.
The dialog also offers a few of the most frequently used mount options as check boxes. Two of them are checked in our example (the ones corresponding to the "noauto" and "users" mount options in /etc/fstab). If any additional mount options need to be set or edited, clicking on the "More..." button leads to this simple dialog:
It's really just a simple list of mount options. Note that these are not verified by KDE Partition Manager for correctness, so care must be taken when editing here.
Clicking on the "OK" button in the first dialog will save the changes to /etc/fstab after one final warning message. Also note that the generated /etc/fstab will lose all comments and elaborate formatting. A backup of /etc/fstab will be saved to /etc/fstab.bak so recovery is possible if anything goes really wrong.
12 Comments
This is a good idea!
Another issue I often experience is that many users buy an external harddisk which is formated with FAT32 and if they use some distro system tools to partition the disk and change the filesystem to some linux fs, it is not accessible to the user because the partition belongs to root. Thus this tool should also include an option to change the user of a filesystem. Partitioning would be even better but is more complex.
Now the only thing I would love to have is partition imaging (create an image of a partition and of course wright an image to a partition). But I guess this might be too much for a partition manager ;-)
Other than that I really like your app.
Ralf
Thank you very much.
You'll be pleased to hear that even version 1.0 had the feature you request. It supports this with the "backup" and "restore" operations.
What's still missing here is compression. That's planned for a release after 1.1. But anyway, writing partitions to images and images to partitions is already possible today.
Does KDE Partition Manager support LVM2 and LUKS/DM-Crypt already? That would rock[1]!
[1] Also before it does, it's useless for me.
I'm afraid you will be disappointed then as KDE Partition Manager does not really support setting up or managing LVM or LUKS volumes, neither in 1.0 not in the upcoming 1.1 release.
Of course, plans (and wishlist entries!) exist to support this, so stay tuned ;-)
OK, I'll wait until then :]
It's good to see it being evolved though!
First of all, thanks for the awesome work. I was amazed and happily surprised when I found out that a KDE Partition Manager exists. I'm using it regularly and it has been superb. Keep up the good work :)
Just to second that, LUKS support would be highly appreciated. Not just in Partitionmanager, but in other KDE utilities as well.
Hi,
Seen that the mount management and SMART support are part of the partition manager, do you plan to rename the project
to KDE Disk Manager or something like that in the near future?
Thanks for the good work!
Wich type of partition will be supported ?
For example, with ntfs3g, depending on your distribution, you have to change the default to have r/w support by setting some cryptic umask and gid (for beginners at least).
i.e
/dev/ /mnt/windows ntfs-3g gid=users,umask=0022 0 0
It would be cool to have a gui based app for change this. :)
It supports all file systems KDE Partition Manager supports. NTFS is among them.
What you describe is possible, but still requires some manual typing because the options are not among those the dialog supports per checkbox.
Still easier than editing /etc/fstab though, especially for a novice user.
A name change would probably do more harm then help at the current point in time, but I agree that the name KDE Partition Manager doesn't accurately describe anymore what the application can do.
We'll see. Maybe at a later date.