Patrick Verner announced yesterday, January 25th, the fifth maintenance release of Parted Magic 3, a Slackware-based Linux distribution designed to help users with partitioning tasks. Parted Magic 3.5 includes various new features and lots of updated packages. It is now powered by Linux kernel 2.6.28.2, which means that Parted Magic 3.5 is the first version to offer stable EXT4 support. Among other changes we can notice better support for wireless devices and some new programs, such as: GSmartControl 0.8.3. Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.5.0, FSArchiver 0.3.5 and SquashFS 3.4. This said, we can definitely say that Parted Magic 3.5 is a bleeding-edge Linux distribution!

"The first thing you might notice is the dramatic increase in size. We are now using a squashfs image instead of a 7zip archive. This once again allows for a "live" option for older computers. Parted Magic doesn't use any additional RAM with the default boot option, the compression was just decreased." - said Patrick Verner in the official release announcement.

The following packages were updated in Parted Magic 3.5:

· Linux kernel 2.6.28.2
· NTFS-3G 2009.1.1
· Lftp 3.7.8
· libburn 0.6.0.pl01
· xfburn 0.4.0
· libisofs 0.6.12
· GParted-SVN with full ext4 support
· dhcp 4.1.0
· dhcpcd 4.0.7
· OpenSSL 0.9.8i
· util-linux-ng 2.14.1
· GTK+ 2.14.6
· Leafpad 0.8.16
· wpa_supplicant 0.5.11
· Roxterm 1.13.4
· rsync 3.0.5
· dbus 1.2.6
· dbus-glib 0.78
· hal 0.5.11
· hal-info 20081127
· hdparm 9.8
· Bash 3.2.48
· BusyBox 1.13.2
· Galculator 1.3.3
· p7zip 4.61
· reiserfsprogs 3.6.21
· xfsdump 2.2.48-1
· xfsprogs 2.10.2-1
· pciutils 3.1.0

Parted Magic is a business-card operating system, based on Slackware Linux, with programs that allow you 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 the GNU General Public License (GPL) and it can be downloaded right now from Softpedia.