Yesterday evening, November 16th, Patrick Verner announced the immediate availability of Parted Magic 4.6, a Slackware-based Linux distribution that was created to help users easily partition their hard drives or perform recovery tasks. Parted Magic 4.6 comes with improved support for netbooks, Super Grub Disk, the Clamav anti-virus and lots of other new packages, improvements and bug fixes. Without further introduction, let's have a look at the long list of changes brought by Parted Magic 4.6:

· Improved support for netbooks;
· Fixed the "ERROR: Current NTFS volume size is bigger than the device size!" error in GNU Parted;
· The Parted Magic Save Session function now uses the xz compression algorithm instead of the 7-zip one;
· Added the Clamav anti-virus tool (the definitions must be downloaded manually, for now);
· Adobe's Flash Player can now be downloaded and installed from the Application Launcher in the Panel;
· Added the epdfview for reading PDF manuals;
· Added a small tool on the desktop, to easily change the keyboard layout;
· Added the lxrandr package to be able to resize the display while in the X11 session;
· Removed Clonezilla from the main ISO image. Parted Magic – Clonezilla is provided as a replacement;
· Recreated the syslinux menus to add sub-menus and more options;
· Redesigned boot menu;
· Linux Software RAID and Device Mapper RAID are now located under the RAID options;
· Device mapper will no longer start at boot time;
· Included Super Grub Disk 1 and 2 (under the syslinux "Extras" sub-menu);
· Numlock will no longer be activated at boot;
· Removed the "sleep=10" boot option, as the boot script of Parted Magic no longer needs it.

The following applications were updated in Parted Magic 4.6:

· Busybox 1.15.2; · memtest86+ 4.00; · Linux kernel 2.6.31.4; · FSArchiver 0.6.1; · GDisk 0.5.0; · Partclone 0.1.9-1; · mdadm 3.0.2; · dosfstools 3.0.6; · OpenSSH 5.3p1; · sdparm 1.04; · hdparm 9.27; · ms-sys 2.1.4; · syslinux 3.83; · grsync 0.9.2; · GParted 0.4.8; · LVM2 2.02.53; · Cairo 1.8.8;

· glib 2.22.2; · GTK+ 2.18.3; · libsigc++ 2.2.4.2; · pangomm 2.26.0; · cairomm 1.8.2; · glibmm 2.22.1; · gtkmm 2.18.2; · Pango 1.26.0; · Pixman 0.16.2; · xz 4.999.9 Beta; · Super Grub Disk 0.9799; · vte 0.22.2; · xfsdump 3.0.3; · xfsprogs 3.0.5; · alsa-lib 1.0.21a; · alsa-utils 1.0.21; · Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5; · Leafpad 0.8.17.

The following applications were added in Parted Magic 4.6:

· Bonnie++ 1.03e;
· iozone3 326;
· DBench 4.0;
· rtorrent 0.8.5;
· LXTerminal 0.1.6-svn;
· epdfview 0.1.7;
· ncdu 1.6;
· extundelete 0.1.8;
· scrounge-ntfs 0.9-6+b1.

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 4.6 right now from Softpedia.