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GParted and the GParted Live CD© Copyright Darrell Anderson. Through my recent efforts to test some Slackware derivative operating systems, I discovered that the 2.6.17.13 kernel provides my aging hardware a perceptible boost in improving the responsiveness of KDE. I like the 2.4.x kernel, but the 2.6.x kernel added just enough punch to my hardware to rekindle my hope of migrating fully one day. I therefore wanted to update my primary box to enjoy the same speed improvement. Unfortunately, my primary box is also my production box and therefore remains relatively static. That box is dual boot and contains my NT4 operating system and all of my data files. I seldom experiment much there. Installing the 2.6.17.13 kernel was not possible on my primary box because of my partition scheme. My Slackware partitions were too small to allow for adding additional software. The primary reason for the small partitions is that my hard drive also contained GNU/Linux software I no longer used. Those partitions could be reclaimed to provide me the room for growth I wanted. As I matured in my understanding about GNU/Linux and Slackware, I knew that eventually a day of reckoning would arrive and I’d have to revise my GNU/Linux partition scheme. Seeing the difference between the 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3 kernel provided me the motivation I needed to decide the day had arrived and that I was going to update my hard drive partitions on my primary box. At one time I regularly used a dependable partitioning product called BootIt NG. For basic partitioning, and copying and moving partitions, this product just works. Period. But the version I burned to CD long ago does not support resizing GNU/Linux file systems. The tool can resize the partition but not the internal file system. Possibly newer versions do—I have not investigated. With my growing experience with GNU/Linux I decided I would test GParted. I downloaded the Live CD, as well as the necessary Slackware packages from linuxpackages.net. Although the Live CD uses the stock GParted, understand that the Live CD and the stock GParted are two separate products. For whatever reason the 0.3.4 version of the GParted Live CD would not run on my box. The kernel started to boot and then just stopped. No panics, nothing. I downloaded the 0.3.3-0 version and booted just fine. I will dispense with any thorough usage description about GParted because plenty of reviews already exist online. I will affirm that the tool works pretty much as advertised. The 0.3.3-0 Live CD also more or less works as advertised. I must emphasize, that with my desire to see some of the Slackware derivative operating systems improve, and to see Slackware improve, that GParted should be the standard partitioning tool provided to end-users when needing to repartition their hard drives to install GNU/Linux operating systems. This includes installing GParted as an individual software application as well as slip streaming the GParted Live CD process into the installation process. Be real—as long as hardware vendors continue to sell computers with Windows preinstalled, GNU/Linux developers will be required to play the repartitioning game. Because most typical end-users are well-accustomed to the point-and-click paradigm, and not the command line, GParted should be a standard product on all GNU/Linux distros. Period. A distinguishing feature about GParted is that the repartitioning process expectedly supports resizing GNU/Linux partitions. At the nitty-gritty level, this requires two individual steps. Resizing the physical boundaries of the partition but also resizing the file system. The Windows and older DOS world tended to mask the fact that file systems and partitions are not one and the same. GParted handles the file system resizing on-the-fly while adjusting the physical partition size. End-users never deal with fdisk, cfdisk, e2fsck, fsck, resizefs, tunefs, etc. Not that these command lines tools should be removed from any GNU/Linux operating system because they are useful tools for the skilled person. But for typical end-users, GParted handles all of this under the hood. So like Windows and the older DOS, GParted tends to hide the fact the partition and file system resizing are two separate operations, but most end-users will not notice nor care. Having seen the beneficial results of the GParted Live CD, I decided to install the software to an external hard drive and add a boot option to my existing GRUB menu.lst. Instructions exist at the GParted Live CD web site and they worked for me flawlessly. With my older hardware I use removable hard drive bays to support external hard drives, much like many people today use USB sticks. Therefore my new menu.lst option looks like this: title GParted Live The GParted web site provides adequate documentation, but English is not the GParted author’s native language. The text is understandable to the patient reader, but some formal editing is needed to update the English version of the text. Despite how well the underlying partitioning support succeeds, the GParted Live CD needs some polish with the user interface. My LCD monitor uses a native 1280 x 1024 screen, and try as I might, the Live CD would not provide me anything greater than 1024 x 768. The solution was to manually select the Xvesa mini server. Automatic hardware detection has been refined to an artful science by several people within the GNU/Linux community and I am puzzled why the Live CD needs these kinds of hoops to provide something that should be automatic. End-users should not have to bother with screen resolutions. Additionally, people using older hardware should not have to manually select the bit-plane color depth. The default is 24 bit-planes. The Live CD should default to 16 bit-planes. A 16-color bit-plane is more than adequate. GParted is, after all, a partitioning program, not a high-end Adobe Photoshop replacement. I also am puzzled why the Live CD author, an obviously skilled and knowledge person, stresses so much emphasis on framebuffers. Many people remain content with their aging hardware with video cards that do not support all of this framebuffer overhead. The Live CD configuration menu ought to allow such users a more easier method to select “plain and simple” video without having to possess extensive knowledge about the video process or card manufacturer. Related to the display, the Live CD author also seems enamored with all the latest video gee-whizary. I’m talking about transparency. I popped open a terminal console within X while running GParted, and found the transparency mode terribly distracting. Partitioning a hard drive is not a task that should include unnecessary distractions. End-users ought to be able to disable all of that video overhead. After all, people use a partitioning program for the function, not the video effects. The Live CD also defaults to a fixed font size when running GParted. When my box continually defaulted to 1024 x 768, despite my selection of 1280 x 1024, the program font size seemed acceptable. With the 1280 x 1024 resolution, the native resolution for my LCD monitor, the font size was too small. The Live CD configuration process ought to increase the default font size on-the-fly when end-users select higher resolutions. Two additional usability flaws were intolerable. One is that Live CD provides no support for left-handed mice. Having to use a right-handed mouse is frustrating. Frustrating. This problem seem epidemic throughout the GNU/Linux developer thinking. I plead with the Live CD author—all GNU/Linux developers—to support left-handed mice. I tried xmodmap from within a terminal window, but that tool is not packaged with the Live CD. Yet even that solution is a only back door for knowledgeable people. A mouse configuration option ought to be available long before X and GParted load and run. Another usability irritant is that NumLock is totally disabled. Although resizing partitions is wonderfully easy with graphical sliders and a mouse, the option is available to type actual numbers too. But not with the NumLock pad. This needs attention. I have no idea why NumLock is disabled or why the overall GNU/Linux developer community seems so hostile to NumLock users. I’d like to see a printing option. I know that supporting various printer drivers is an endless task, but I think a simple generic printer driver could be added. The Live CD is designed to provide screen captures, a handy feature I never tested, but printing a simple text file would be a nice bonus. Text files are editable whereas screen grabs are not. Lastly, Live CDs are great tools, but when people install those operating systems to a hard drive or USB stick, the program needs to be able to support boot parameter options so that end-users can once and for all avoid having to always manually configure the program. The GParted Live CD 0.3.3-0 supports no such feature and I hope this is remedied in future versions. I did run into one potential GParted bug. On my test box I wanted to expand the size of a primary partition at hda3, which required me to reduce the size of my extended partition at hd4. Working through the process of resizing the various logical partitions was straightforward, a testament to the overall good design of GParted. Yet when I accomplished my goal and rebooted, the kernel could not boot from my root partition located on a logical partition. I was puzzled because before rebooting I had within GParted manually mounted all of my newly resized partitions just to check and see everything. Everything was there. I double-checked my GRUB menu.lst. No mistakes. Yet the kernel would not boot from the root partition. On a whim, I booted that older copy of BootIt NG. A casual look at the extended partition revealed the partition was tagged as type 5 rather than type 15. I used BootIt NG to modify the partition type and then rebooted. Everything booted clean as a whistle. No problems. More curiously, the first logical partition on the extended partition was tagged as Not Compatible (the NC flag in cfdisk). I do not know whether GParted did this, or when I modified the extended partition type with BootIt NG that this quirk appeared. I ended up recreating that one partition and reinstalling files from my backup. Therefore I’d like to see GParted provide a repair function such that the partition super block information can be repaired without destroying the data. Both my primary and test box are now fully repartitioned to my current needs and wants. I am content with the entire effort. I successfully removed the partitions containing old unused distros and I resized the remaining partitions and file systems to reclaim that storage space. I now have plenty of room to grow my Slackware installation. I updated Slackware on my primary box with the 2.6.17.13 kernel and like my test box, I notice an improvement with how KDE responds. I feel like a pig in mud and all that. In all I recommend GParted. There is room for usability improvements, but to the careful and cautious user, GParted is one of those wonderfully useful tools. The Live CD also is a helpful tool, although rough around the user interface. Too bad the equivalent QT version is no longer in active development, which would blend more nicely in the KDE environment. UpdateI downloaded the newly released version 0.3.4-3 of the Live CD. Unlike the 0.3.4 version that stalled on my box, this version booted. Upon booting the Live CD the first thing I saw was a screen that looks like something from a psychedelic cartoon. I hope the author soon stops this and learns something about basic user interfaces. The CD now boots directly into a GRUB boot loader menu. With the backdrop splash rainbow effect, reading the menu option required some squinting on my part until I moved the selector cursor to highlight each item. Through those GRUB options the author now provides the ability to boot for some different video setups. I selected the VESA option. The kernel booted nicely, but loading the 45 MB gparted.dat image file from my older CD drive required many finger taps on the desk while waiting for the file to copy and load. The first thing I noticed when presented with the keymap and language selection options is that once again, NumLock is disabled, but at least I could enable NumLock manually. The author has now opted for a Gentoo (originally created by Red Hat) style “interactive” boot style (each line displays an [OK] signal when successful). This is more informative than the previous 0.3.3-0 version and cleaner looking too. Unfortunately, despite correctly reading my video card, the boot process was limited to a maximum of 1024 x 768 display and the result was terribly skewered and garbled. Through that garbled mess I could see three images of GParted scanning my hard drives. No alternate console sessions were active and with the screen so garbled I was unable to find the exit button with the mouse. The traditional three-finger salute failed as well. Being unable to discern anything, I pressed the box reset button to try again. As an afterthought, a subsequent reboot and test revealed that I could have used the standard Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to exit X. Unfortunately for novices, this information is displayed after the user exits X. The next time I selected the framebuffer video option. I do not like the framebuffer mode because the left edge of the display never aligns properly on my monitor and in framebuffer mode the boot text seems to scroll slower on my older hardware. I manually edited the GRUB framebuffer option to include the vga=3 option and that provided me a more readable display while booting. I think developers do all or most of their testing on newer hardware and they tend to forget to configure older hardware. After the same long pause for loading from CD, this time the screen remained intact, although again at 1024 x 768 resolution. Again there were no alternate consoles available after starting X. Unlike the 0.3.3-0 version, the mouse pointer seems to be on steroids, with the acceleration mode too sensitive for my hardware. I had to move the mouse pointer slowly. There remains no support for left-handed mice. The author seems to have discarded the Xfce terminal window from version 0.3.3-0 and opted for a basic xterm session with that awful white background. I have always found a black background more readable with the colored text. At least the terminal window is now no longer subjected to using transparency mode. Although I manually enabled NumLock when selecting my keymap and language preferences, as expected, booting into X disabled NumLock. The hostility toward NumLock remains, but again, at least I could enable NumLock manually. Using that 1024 x 768 display on my LCD monitor that uses a native 1280 x 1024 was a tad blurry, and along with the snake-jumpy mouse pointer and forced right-handed mouse, I proceeded no further. After exiting GParted and X I reviewed the boot process still visible on screen. Oddly, the hardware detection routine determined that I was using a generic monitor. This I do not understand because Knoppix from several years ago detected my LCD monitor correctly and so did my recent installation of Zenwalk. I next inspected the underlying file system. The xorg.conf file was not properly configured for my monitor, using a horizontal sync of 28–96 KHz rather than the correct and more restrictive 30–81 KHz, and a vertical sync of 50–75 Hz rather than 56–75 Hz. The xorg.conf file included no display modes higher than 1024 x 768. All probably because of the faulty monitor detection. After exiting X and GParted, I could access the other alternate consoles. Reviewing the /etc/inittab file showed the six terminal consoles being respawned with the -nl option to run the /bin/bashlogin script. I’m no expert with understanding inittab and agetty, but I presume this combination, along with the script, disables the alternate consoles. I do not know why those consoles should not be available when in X. Part of the beauty of using a ‘nix system are the various ways users can recover their system. I did later discover that the kernel is compiled with the useful Alt-SysRq option. With the new boot system on this Live CD the previous instructions at the GParted web site for installing to a hard drive now are obsolete. The web site should be updated because after some trial-and-error, I was unable to create a boot option for running version 0.3.4-3 from a hard drive. The kernel booted fine but the boot process never liked any combination of the loop parameter I tried. After playing with my system menu.lst I then realized that the original menu.lst option I was modifying from the ISO image was actually the default boot option. Unfortunately, the author’s idea of a user interface renders the default option to look like a grand title for the GRUB menu rather than an actual boot option. Yes, as a long-time user of GRUB I probably should have recognized this, but users need to see how the GParted author created the GRUB menu option to appreciate the deception. The menu selection is a long string of asterisks rather than a typical string of readable text. The author needs to replace all of those asterisks with a simpler message like (Boot with the defaults) or something similar. With that knowledge I again booted the CD, this time using the default boot option. Nothing unusual happened and the hardware detection again failed to properly detect my LCD monitor. Compared to 0.3.3-0 the newer 0.3.4-3 version is a mixed bag of improvements and setbacks. I remain convinced that GParted is a useful and dependable tool. Yet one important fact about the Live CD troubles me. When I tried to run the 0.3.4-3 software on my primary box, the CD stalled at the Freeing unused kernel memory point. The next step thereafter is to load kernel modules, which never occurred. I wonder whether the GParted Live CD is compiled only for 686 CPUs. Unlike my PII test box, my primary box contains a 400 MHz K6-III+ CPU. Although the K6-III+ performs on par with or better than a PII processor, the K6-III+ is nonetheless a Socket-7 chip—a 586 class CPU. Not only do I want to see better detection support for my Samsung SyncMaster 712N 1280 x 1024 LCD monitor, as well as some updated instructions for installing to a hard drive, but the GParted Live CD 0.3.4-3 is unusable on my primary box. I have seen this happen recently with another Live CD where support for the 586 stopped—the System Rescue CD. If the reason is the same for the GParted Live CD then this is bad news. Or possibly the stall has something to do with the gentoo-catalyst system that went into effect with the subsequent 0.3.3.5 version. Or possibly a combination of the two. The problem needs attention because the 0.3.4-3 Live CD will not finish booting on my 586 box. This probably was the case when I originally tried the 0.3.4 version too. I probably only tested that version on my 586 box. Although the stock GParted seems stable and mature despite the 0.3.3 version number, the GParted Live CD needs some help with the overall user interface, video monitor detection, and possibly the incompatibility with 586 CPUs. And the Live CD author needs to learn that some people in this world use left-handed mice. UpdateThe maintainer of the Live CD is receptive to improvement suggestions and responded well to my critique. Although the only person supporting the Live CD, improvements will be forthcoming, I’m sure. Finis. Next: Vector Linux — Part 1 |
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