A new stable GParted version is ready for download

Oct 21, 2014 08:47 GMT  ·  By

GParted, or the GNOME Partition Editor, is a small bootable GNU/Linux distribution for x86-based computers that is very useful for creating and deleting disk partitions with great ease. A new stable release has been made, and from the looks of it, the new 0.20.0 version is something of a milestone.

Don't be fooled by the seemingly small version number of Gparted. It's actually a very old application that's been around for many years. The main reason that the version number is still well under 1.0 is the fact that the developer is making really small steps with each new release.

Surprisingly enough, GParted 0.20.0 is actually a stable version, but it had quite a few development iterations before it. These are used to add features and various other options well before the final iteration gets to the regular users or it gets implemented in repositories.

GParted 0.20.0 is more about fixes

"GNOME Partition Editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions. It uses libparted from the parted project to detect and manipulate partition tables. Optional file system tools permit managing file systems are not included in libparted," reads the official website.

Users can do all sorts of interesting things with this application, including creating partition tables for various file systems, create, delete, copy, resize, move, check, set new UUID, or label partitions, change partition flags, perform data rescue from hard drivers (not guaranteed), and provide support for all kinds of RAID setups.

The developers have explained that devid is now provided when resizing multi-device btrfs, the manual has been updated with instructions for GRUB 2 restoration, the autoconf configure.ac and related files have been cleaned up, the display is no longer flashing when refreshing devices, and a number of translations have been updated.

How to get the latest GParted

The developers only provide the source packages for GParted 0.20.0 and it's not all that difficult to compile the new version. It's not the easiest way to do it, but it will take a while until this particular release hits the repositories. Distros like Arch Linux will probably get it first, but others, like Ubuntu, which are still providing the 0.16 version, will not have it available right away. If you happen to know of a PPA for Ubuntu users, please make sure that you leave a comment below.

A complete list of new features and bug fixes can be found in the announcement. You can download the source packages for GParted 0.20.0 right now from Softpedia.