The long awaited KDE Partition Manager 1.1.0 is now released. However, there are some sad news first. This release is dedicated to the memory of Volker Lanz who passed away this April. He was the main developer of KDE Partition Manager who wrote almost all of its code and maintained it for 5 years.

The most important changes in this release are support for Btrfs file system and GPT partition table. This release also adds support for exFAT, NILFS 2 and very basic support for ZFS, encrypted LUKS containers and LVM2 physical volumes. There are some nice GUI improvements as well, partition widget design was improved by Hugo Pereira Da Costa.

On the other hand, there are still missing features and bugs. It would be nice to have a better support for LUKS and LVM volumes. There is also a slightly annoying bug #311408 which prevents detection of disks without any partition table when Solid is used with udisks2 backend. It seems that udisks2 does not let you easily obtain a block device corresponding to a particular drive, so Solid backend has to guess it (usually incorrectly) and then partition manager fails to find any disks. I have implemented a workaround to look for partition tables instead of drives (then Partition Manager has to be compiled with -DENABLE_UDISKS2).

As you can see Partition Manager really needs a few more developers. Its code is less scary then it might seem. After all it is a GUI and most of low level stuff is done my external programs.

Port to KDE Frameworks 5 is also almost complete and will be released once all issues are fixed. There is still some unported code, e.g. at src/backend/corebackenmanager.cpp. If any KF5 porting experts know how to fix this it would be very appreciated.

KDE Partition Manager can be downloaded from http://download.kde.org/stable/partitionmanager/1.1.0/src/partitionmanager-1.1.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist

SHA256Sum: 30ac75f85bb61e6ec9b6f5d80dee4a2c8501a0a0c62997f6d734e63459802cc8 partitionmanager-1.1.0.tar.xz

SHA1Sum: 797964522d077ec9daae752bd2d40f1bd284d149 partitionmanager-1.1.0.tar.xz

MD5Sum: 4a752c250fc5c98e22aba1d2ea309bec partitionmanager-1.1.0.tar.xz

GPG signature can be found at https://stikonas.eu/files/partitionmanager-1.1.0.tar.xz.sig