Patrick Verner announced yesterday, October 18th, the first maintenance release of his Linux distribution, Parted Magic 3.0. Version 3.1 contains minor changes, a few updated applications and also a handful of new additions. However, there is one important feature that comes with Parted Magic 3.1, and that is the availability of an HDD version! "One of the most important new developments is the HDD version. This is a new concept in rescue/partitioning environments. It's basically a copy and paste USB distribution for system admins and is the future of the Parted Magic project." - said Patrick Verner, Parted Magic developer. For more information about how to install Parted Magic on your hard drive or USB stick, visit this page.

And now, let's take a look at the new additions that can be found in Parted Magic 3.1:

· Added a graphical user interface (GUI) for udpcast;
· Added a command-line option that allows you to specify the size of tmpfs (default is 180 MB). With this new option, you will be able to leave more RAM for applications;
· dmeventd will be started by default. If you want to disable it, type nodmeventd at the boot prompt;
· The following new packages were added: cryptsetup, rdesktop, zfs-fuse, G4L (Ghost 4 Linux), qlogic firmware.

Moreover, Patrick Verner decided to drop the XFCE environment and use the extremely-lightweight LXDE desktop.

The packages updated in Parted Magic 3.1 are:

· Linux kernel 2.6.27.1
· X.org 7.4
· X.org Server 1.5.2
· Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3
· GParted 0.3.9-svn
· Xarchiver 0.5.0 Beta 2
· e2fsprogs 1.41.3
· NTFS-3G 1.5012
· Udev 130
· BusyBox 1.12.1
· TestDisk 6.11
· FUSE 2.7.4
· Lftp 3.7.4
· Conky 1.6.1
· Fireftp 1.0.2
· Rsync 3.0.4
· lvm2 2.02.40
· dc3dd 6.12.1

At the end of the release announcement, Patrick Verner talks a little about the feature of Parted Magic: "Version 4.0 will be largely based on Slackware Linux, and will offer package management and most things you would expect from a small rescue environment. My honest opinion is the death of CDs and DVDs is closer than most people think and the dominance of flash media with RW is the future of any system admins toolbox. This forum post describes the new HDD version. In the weeks to come, new documents will be written to describe its uses in better detail. The 3.x series might be the last of the RO ‘Live&’ media environments for Parted Magic which a large number of distributions do better than us anyway."

Parted Magic is a business-card operating system, based on Slackware Linux, with programs that allow a user to partition hard disks with ease. Programs like Partition Image, TestDisk, fdisk, sfdisk, dd, ddrescue, and a good documentation will help you in your partitioning tasks. Parted Magic is licensed under GPL.

Download Parted Magic 3.1 right now from Softpedia.