14 DAY TRIAL // Andrius Štikonas has announced the release of the KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0 open-source partition editor software designed specifically for the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment, as well as the KPMcore 2.2.0 utility.
KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore 2.2.0 are two major releases, finally bringing proper LUKS (Linux Unified Key Setup) support, in the sense that the software is now capable of creating LUKS volumes on disk drivers, as well as formatting the inner file system, besides detecting the LUKS container.
The developer recommends you to have cryptsetup 1.6 or later installed on your GNU/Linux operating system before attempting to create LUKS volumes, which support EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, Btrfs, ReiserFS, Reiser4, XFS, JFS, SWAP, ZFS and LVM physical volumes for the inner, encrypted file system.
"Other than detection support for LVM PV, the support for LVM is not implemented but this might change soon as a result of GSoC project, there is already some LVM PV resize support in git master," said Andrius Štikonas. "If you create other file systems manually using command line tools they will still work."
LUKS volumes can be opened and closed
Another interesting feature introduced in the KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0 release as part of the massive LUKS support improvements is the ability to open and close LUKS volumes, as well as to resize the encrypted filesystems with LUKS, which makes KDE Partition Manager the only open-source partition editor tool that can do that.
Furthermore, the software now lets you move closed LUKS partitions, check the inner filesystems for errors, mount them, as well as set labels, remove opened LUKS partitions, and copy LUKS partitions (both these operations require the LUKS partitions to be closed).
Other than that, there are better support for the latest Qt 5.6.1 GUI toolkit, improved support when resizing NILFS2 filesystems, support for setting NTFS labels via NTFS-3G's ntfslabel component, as well as Clang compilation and C++11 support. KPMcore 2.2.0 is also out, and it is available for the Calamares 2.2.2 installer framework.
Download the KDE Partition Manager 2.2.0 sources right now via our website, but we recommend that you check for the new version on the main software repositories of your GNU/Linux operating system and update from there. The new version is already available for Arch Linux users.