Good things first: Using the KDE Partition Manager version from svn is safe.

There hasn't been any substantial development work being done on KDE Partition Manager for quite some time. This is indeed very deplorable and mostly owed to the fact that I am so far the only developer working on the project. The time I was able to devote to open source work has been severely limited over the last couple of months due to, as they say, circumstances beyond my control.

So the project has remained in a rather dormant state since my series of blog entries about the upcoming featurs in version 1.1 and the post about the new partition widget design that had been so magnificiently done by Hugo.

As an aside, this design has again been improved quite a bit after that post, so here's a current KDE Partition Manager screenshot (also, everyone likes screenshots):

Meanwhile, the GNU Parted devs have released a new version of libparted, 3.0, that does away with its former support for resizing FAT-based file systems (and a few other special cases that libparted used to cover for historical reasons). This version is now the only one shipping with a few distributions, among them Gentoo.

In KDE's subversion, I have at one point last year actually added support for the new libparted 3.0 version to KDE Partition Manager (support being an euphemism for: remove FAT16 and FAT32 resizing and a few other things when building against libparted 3.0). Gentoo have then proceeded to ship (as much as Gentoo can be said to ship anything) an svn-snapshot of KDE Partition Manager that has the version number 1.0.60 (denominating it as an alpha release in KDE's version number scheme). Other distributions have followed or will probably do so in the near future.

Now using a subversion snapshot for an application that is supposed to perform potentially destructive actions on your important data sounds like an unwise choice, does it not?

To put it briefly: Version 1.0.60 is no more dangerous to your data than 1.0.3 is. The code involved performing the potentially harardous actions is mature and thoroughly tested. There's no guarantee in either versions and there have indeed been modifications to code areas that deal with moving data within file systems for 1.0.60, but it's not like this has all been rewritten from scratch with totally unexplored code-paths now being let out into the wild sans any prior testing. The code works, is safe and I have used it numerous times myself on my disks, not just for testing.

Making backups before touching your file systems with any tool is still the diligent thing to do.

If and when KDE Partition Manager will see a 1.1 release is still not certain; I'm trying to figure out what I can do to accelerate matters a bit.

tl;dr Using KDE Partition Manager from subversion (with a version number of 1.0.60 or higher) is no more dangerous to your data than using 1.0.x.

Hard on the heels of the release of KDE Partition Manager 1.0.3 follows the new version of the KDE Partition Manager Live CD, now also featuring version 1.0.3.

A new release in the stable branch of KDE Partition Manager is out. Version 1.0.3 brings minor fixes and improvements:

• Make sure available and used capacity are not printed in a partition's properties dialog if they are not known
• Make sure fsck.msdos does not want to modify a file system when it is being called to read the file system usage
• Warn the user when trying to overwrite an existing partition with another or an image file
• Clear the clipboard if undoing an operation deleted the partition that was in it

After some people complained on this blog's comments that KDE Partition Manager looked "win95-ish" to them (due to wrong choice of colors) I instantly set off to talk to the nice people on the #oxygen irc channel about this.

What they said was: Your colors are fine. It still looks bad.

So Hugo Pereira Da Costa came up with ideas how to improve the look and went on to turn those ideas into code. Today the new look was submitted to svn.

Let me conclude my little sequence of posts on new features in KDE Partition Manager 1.1 with some small yet useful features that were not spectacular enough to warrant a post dedicated to any of them exclusively.

GPT Partition Tables

There is without a doubt something to be said in favour of applications that cannot be configured: If they work more or less exactly the way the user wants them to they are simply perfect. Now, KDE Partition Manager 1.0 was maybe not quite perfect -- but at least it could not be configured in any way.

Anyway, this is about to change with KDE Partition Manager 1.1: The new version comes with a fantastic new two-page configuration dialog. The first page is for general settings and looks like this:

In KDE Partition Manager there are three dialogs dealing with a partition sizes, all of them using the same code base internally. These dialogs are: the dialog to create a new partition, the one to resize an existing partition and the dialog to insert a copied or imported partition.

Hard drives are getting bigger and bigger, a trend that leads to some technical challenges hard to overcome without user-noticable changes. The increase in hard disk size means that the areal density (the number of bits stored per square inch on the drive) also increases heavily, which is a good thing at first glance: The higher the areal density the faster the same amount of data can be read and written. Thus the drives not only get larger, they also get faster.

Larger, Faster And Less Reliable?

KDE Partition Manager 1.1 gains support for reading, analyzing and reporting the SMART status of disks. SMART (sometimes also written as S.M.A.R.T.) is an acronym for "Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology". In plain English it is a monitoring system for hard drives and its intention is to give the computer user a chance to take action before an impending hard drive failure -- the action being to copy his data to another disk, of course.

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.