14 DAY TRIAL // This Sunday, Patrick Verner announced the release of Parted Magic 4.5, a new version of the popular partitioning and data-recovery Linux distribution. It includes many fixes and improvements, especially for Intel graphics cards and the newly introduced point to point networking support.
We all know that getting the latest Xorg to play well with some Intel graphics cards can be a tough nut to crack, but the developers managed to add support for them, allowing the user to select the desired video driver at boot time, as Patrick Verner points out in the release announcement: "To combat some of the problems associated with the newer versions of Xorg and Intel chipsets, Parted Magic offers driver versions intel-2.4.1, intel-2.5.1, intel-2.6.3, intel-2.7.1 to the boot options. At the first boot screen press <TAB> and then add one of the listed drivers to the syslinux command line. Parted Magic will then install them while the system is booting. Most people will not have to do this because the default intel-2.8.1 driver fixes most problems from previous releases."
Running Parted Magic 4.5 on computers with low hardware specs is now made easier, as running the distribution from RAM now requires 192MB of physical memory, which is quite an improvement from the 256MB requirement in Parted Magic 4.4. Also, you can get it to start with only 48MB of memory if you select the "Live with low RAM settings" boot option.
Another interesting addition, one that you wouldn't expect to find in a minimal Linux distribution, is represented by the Bluetooth packages. You will find bluez-utils 3.36, bluez-libs 3.36 and bluez-hcidump 1.42 on the CD, ready to fulfill your Bluetooth connection needs. Also, NTFS support has been improved once again, with the inclusion of ntfsdump_logfile, ntfswipe, ntfstruncate, ntfsmove, ntfsmftalloc and ntfsck.
Download Parted Magic 4.5 right now from Softpedia.