Less than two months after releasing version 5.10, the Parted Magic development team has announced the arrival of version 6.0 of its open source, multi-platform partitioning tool. Discussing this major update to their LiveCD, Linux-based PC rescue toolkit, the developers said that, "The way the kernel is handled has been completely redone," adding that, "This is the reason for the new major version number."

According to the developers, the kernel modules, udev, and firmware have now been moved to the initramfs, addressing several booting issues found in previous versions. Furthermore, the update also removes "the nice graphical boot menu", which the developers have been using for years, in favour of a "very basic one". They say that this was done to improve device compatibility as many laptops and notebooks could not start the complex menu.



The default Parted Magic 6.0 desktop. Parted Magic 6.0 is based on the 2.6.38 Linux kernel and features version 1.18.4 of the BusyBox tool collection, version 4.20 of the Memtest86++ tool, version 2011.4.12 of the NTFS-3G read / write NTFS driver and version 3.1.4 xfsprogs XFS file system utilities. However, not all package changes were upgrades; Nwipe has been downgraded to 0.03 and the SimpleBurn CD / DVD burning and extraction tool is now at version 1.6.0.2. A "large number of major and minor bugs" have also been fixed.

Parted Magic can be used to create, move, delete and resize drive partitions and will run on a machine with as little as 64 MB of RAM. File systems supported include NTFS, FAT, ReiserFS, Reiser4 and HFS+. LVM and RAID are also supported.

Details about the release, including a full list of changes and package updates, can be found in the official release announcement and in the change log. Parted Magic 6.0 is available to download as an ISO image file. Hosted on SourceForge or available from alternate mirrors, Parted Magic is released under version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2).

See also:

(crve)