KDE Partition Manager 3.2.0

I have just released versions 3.2.0 of KDE Partition Manager and KPMcore library. Note that if you use Calamares installer you need version 3.1.4 or later, earlier versions of Calamares will not compile against new kpmcore.

Changes:

  • Detection support for ISO9660 file system.
  • KPMcore now has lighter KDE Frameworks dependencies, KIO is no longer necessary, KIconThemes dependency moved from kpmcore to Partition Manager.
  • Our own fstab parser and writer. Before we used to rely on glibc but it had no support for reading fstab comments, so they were lost when writing fstab.
  • Added support for UDF file system (this change requires util-linux 2.30). While adding support for UDF, the following general improvements were made:
    – KPM now supports setting label for file systems where it can only be done during initial formating (e.g. nilfs2 or udf)
    – File system label widget (QLineEdit) now validates its input for certain file systems (at the moment only FAT and UDF), not just checks maximum label length.

Future directions:

At the moment I’m slowly experimenting with refactoring kpmcore (not requiring libparted) but it is not part of the current release. The new backend that might appear in later releases can now delete and create partitions but cannot do other stuff (creating partition table, resizing/moving partitions, etc). Hopefully, this will make running KDE Partition Manager and possibly Calamares rootlessly easier. Maybe a GSoC project for next year to finish rootless support if anybody is interested.

There are also a few small portability fixes. In the future even this might be possible (feel free to help). Sorry for non Plasma screenshot :), I just used Live CD, so didn’t bother installing another desktop into RAM.

Download links:

https://download.kde.org/stable/kpmcore/3.2.0/src/kpmcore-3.2.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
https://download.kde.org/stable/kpmcore/3.2.0/src/kpmcore-3.2.0.tar.xz.sig.mirrorlist
https://download.kde.org/stable/partitionmanager/3.2.0/src/partitionmanager-3.2.0.tar.xz.mirrorlist
https://download.kde.org/stable/partitionmanager/3.2.0/src/partitionmanager-3.2.0.tar.xz.sig.mirrorlist

As usual signed with my key: 1EE5 A320 5904 BAA2 B88C 0A9D 24FD 3194 0095 C0E1

12 comments on “KDE Partition Manager 3.2.0

  • Hi, Andrius… I’ve been desperately looking for a GUI partition manager that can handle LUKS and LVM. KDE Partition Manager seems to fit the bill, but I am running Debian 9.x with Wayland and I need to manage the partitions (LUKS LVM) of my internal hard drive.
    Based on some of the research I’ve done, I reckon it might be “simplest” to install Kubuntu 17.10 on an external hard drive, install KDE Partition Manager, if it doesn’t come already pre-installed, boot into Kubuntu with my laptop attached and fire up KDE PM. Any caveats you can think of? Many thanks for this app.

    Reply
    • Hmm, not sure if it’s the simplest. First of all, live cd is probably simpler than installing on external hard drive. Although, you need to run apt install partitionmanager every time after you boot live cd. By the way, if you go this route, Neon Stable has much newer partitionmanager than Kubuntu 17.10.

      Also, you can do quite a lot with partition manager installed on your Debian, although, there are a few caveats. The version in Debian is a bit old, and they didn’t patch one serious crash on Debian Stable (so do not press Cancel during a running operation). Also, I think LUKS encrypted LVM logical volumes have incorrect free space reporting on Debian 9.x. Finally, on Wayland you can run KPM as wayland client, but not as XWayland client (unless you do xhost +su workaround or something like that), you can always temporary switch back to X11 too.
      Although, you can’t always work with mounted partitions. Well, if you rootfs is btrfs, you can both shrink and grow it from inside running system while it is mounted. On the other hand, ext4 can only be grown online, you have to unmount it before shrinking.

      Reply
      • Yeah, “simplest” might be a stretch, but long term maybe the most convenient in case I have to revisit similar issues. Thanks for pointing me to KDE Neon. I will download the latest User Edition. Does this come with your most recent version (KDE Partition Manager 3.2.0)?
        I’ve found working with LUKS LVM volumes on Debian a real pain. There’s no easy way to manage these volumes especially since the volume shouldn’t be mounted in most instances (Well at least the ones I had dealt with). This shouldn’t be that difficult with LUKS and LVM being so common place. So I hope KDE Partition Manager 3.2.0 will come to my rescue. Cheers!

        Reply
  • Ade Malsasa Akbar says:

    Hello Mr. Stikonas,

    I am a KDE Partition Manager user and I’m happy with it. Thank you for developing it.

    Reply
    • Well, not polkit directly. The plan is to use KAuth which is Tier 2 KDE Framework and an abstraction on top of Polkit. But there is still some refactoring before KAuth can be wired in. We need to replace libparted backend with something that just calls executables. We have ExternalCommand (child of QProcess) class to call external executables. Like I said we need to replace most places where root is required with external command calls. And then we can try to refactor that ExternalCommand class into KAuth helper.

      Reply
  • OlafLostViking says:

    Hi Andrius,

    what a coincidence! I am currently searching for a way to format an usb drive so that it’s compatible to Linux (Live CDs -> they mostly can’t boot from exfat; fat32 cannot support big images on the other hand), Windows and MacOS. But I’ve read lots of negative things concerning the compatibility of UDF between those systems. After not finding UDF in kpm, I concluded even you guys think it’s a bad idea and decided to move on.

    Now you say you’re working on it… sooo, do you have experiences with the cross platform compatibility? Is it a feasible way to exchange files between all three systems? Will kpm take care to partition/format a drive so that all three operating systems are able to work with it?

    Thank you for your work!

    Reply
    • Well, right now it probably wouldn’t work with Mac but work with Windows. The problem is that KPM doesn’t not know how to create full device file systems (i.e. no partition table, just one UFD file system). And I think Mac only knows about whole device UDF. It should work on Windows, there is a code in KPM that sets the required partition type on MBR, so I think that would be enough for Windows. udftools maintainer who helped with UDF support probably tested it. I can’t test it myself as I have no Windows machines. And neither do I have Mac machines. So any testing is appreciated.

      Reply
      • If it may be useful:
        ——————————————————————–
        DrYak wrote:

        In my experience, the best shared OS partitions are still
        – UDF (as long as you do the [partition table trick](https://github.com/JElchison/format-udf)) : log-structured, supported by all desktop OS, supports modern features like several-GB-long files, long filenames, etc. (optionally : access rights and case-sensitive)
        – FAT32: awful (filesize < 2 GiB, very crash-prone structure, etc.) but at least universally supported even on embed device (like photo camera).

        (And at all possible, steer clear of exFAT : lots of the same drawbacks as FAT32 (except file size) while even less widely supported and patent-encumbered).

        ——————————————————————–

        [And congratulations for KDE Partition Manager!]

        Reply

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