Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Friday 1 May 2009, 2:09 PM
In Praise of Gparted
I have been trying to rationalize the multitude of partitions on my various laptops today, and I just want to say that the Gnome Partition Editor (gparted) has really been fantastic. Using it, I have added, removed, moved, enlarged and shrunk all sorts of partitions, all without ever losing anything.
Here's a good example of why this is so impressive. I wanted to enlarge the Jaunty partition on my S6510 from 8 GB to 16 GB. Of course you can't alter the partition you are booted from (or any other mounted partition for that matter), so I booted my nice new Mandriva 2009.1 partition - it understands ext4 file systems, so I should be able to do what I want from there. But I have loaded the KDE version of Mandriva, so it doesn't have gparted... and when I told that one what I wanted to do, it said "All data will be lost in the partition"! Not good! So I scrubbed that, and booted the Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, which I know has gparted on it. I told that what I wanted to do... and it said ok, and 10 minutes later it was all done. I booted the newly expanded Jaunty partition, and the world is a wonderful place.
The Gnome Partition Editor is not included in the Ubuntu base install, but all you have to do after installation is go to Synaptic and install gparted. That has been a standard step in my post-installation setup and configuration for a long time.
Happy May Day!
jw 1/5/2009
Here's a good example of why this is so impressive. I wanted to enlarge the Jaunty partition on my S6510 from 8 GB to 16 GB. Of course you can't alter the partition you are booted from (or any other mounted partition for that matter), so I booted my nice new Mandriva 2009.1 partition - it understands ext4 file systems, so I should be able to do what I want from there. But I have loaded the KDE version of Mandriva, so it doesn't have gparted... and when I told that one what I wanted to do, it said "All data will be lost in the partition"! Not good! So I scrubbed that, and booted the Ubuntu 9.04 LiveCD, which I know has gparted on it. I told that what I wanted to do... and it said ok, and 10 minutes later it was all done. I booted the newly expanded Jaunty partition, and the world is a wonderful place.
The Gnome Partition Editor is not included in the Ubuntu base install, but all you have to do after installation is go to Synaptic and install gparted. That has been a standard step in my post-installation setup and configuration for a long time.
Happy May Day!
jw 1/5/2009
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