Yesterday evening, on June 16th, Patrick Verner proudly announced the immediate release of Parted Magic 4.2, a Slackware-based Linux distribution that was created to help users easily partition their hard drivers or perform recovery tasks. Parted Magic 4.2 is now powered by the newly released Linux kernel 2.6.30 and it includes the popular Clonezilla hard disk cloning software. Clonezilla is not provided at boot time, like other similar distributions; instead it is offered as an application accessible directly from the desktop (see the screenshot below for details). Parted Magic 4.2 also fixes several bugs and brings new/updated applications (see below for details).

"It took some modifications to get it working and the Clonezilla author Steven Shiau did a fantastic job helping us make the necessary changes to Parted Magic so it would work the way it was intended to work. Without his input, it would have taken much longer and users probably would have encountered bugs caused by Parted Magic. I can't thank Steven enough." - Patrick Verner said in the official release announcement.

Parted Magic 4.2 with Clonezilla

Important changes in Parted Magic 4.2:

· bzip2 was replaced with pbzip2;
· gzip was replaced with pigz;
· Fixed the "save session" function in the LiveUSB edition;
· Better support for Italian key maps;
· Fixed the multiple instances issue in the menu;
· The Xvesa settings are now saved if the "save session" option is used.

New packages in Parted Magic 4.2:

· Curl 7.19.5
· Clonezilla 2.3.3-33
· Partclone 0.1.1-10
· DRBL 1.9.4-33
· AWK 3.1.6
· Sed 4.1.5
· grep 2.5.3
· TightVNC 1.3.9 (vncviewer only)
· mkswap-uuid 0.1.0-2
· and a script that allows you to suspend USB hard drives

Updated packages in Parted Magic 4.2:

· Linux kernel 2.6.30 · dmraid_1.0.0 RC15 · udev 142 · lftp 3.7.14 · rsync 3.0.6 · util-linux-ng 2.15.1 · FSArchiver 0.5.7 · GPicView 0.1.99 · GSmartControl 0.8.4 · NTFS-3G 2009.4.4AR.10 (Advanced NTFS-3G Features) · TrueCrypt 6.2 · reiser4progs 1.0.7 · progsreiserfs 0.3.0.5 · safecopy 1.3 · Conky 1.7.1.1

· pciutils 3.1.2 · ext3grep 0.10.1 · findutils 4.4.2 · sshfs-fuse 2.2 · TestDisk 6.11-3 · Galculator 1.3.4 · BusyBox 1.14.1 · e2fsprogs 1.41.6 · GTK+ 2.16.2 · Glib 2.20.3 · Syslinux 3.82 · Grsync 0.9.0 · Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 99 · Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.6.0 · usbutils 0.82

About Parted Magic

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).

Download Parted Magic 4.2 right now from Softpedia.