I will always have fdisk, but, for most new users, it is just too complicated to use. In Windows there's Partition Magic that facilitates a lot all the tasks related to creation and alteration of partitions. Because the people from PowerQuest found the best way to do this, Vanni Brutto decided to make a clone that is freely available in Linux. Because it uses the Qt toolkit for the graphical interface and GNU parted as a base, the program was named simply QtParted.

The Filesystems

As I said before, the base of this program is parted , from which QtParted inherited the support for some filesystems such as fat32 and linux-swap. Parted supports a lot more, but in the current version of the program some file systems are handled by other software packages, which are better than parted. Parted can only detect NTFS but can't alter it. QtParted can both create and resize NTFS partitions because it uses software from the Linux-NTFS project. On the other hand, QtPparted can only create and destroy ext2 and ext3 partitions while parted can also resize and move them. For a reason that is a total mystery to me, the developers of QtParted preferred to use e2fsprogs instead of parted for ext2 and ext3 filesystems. Other filesystems like JFS and XFS are supported through jfsutils and xfsprogs. A good support for Macintosh HFS is inherited from parted.

The Interface

QtParted instantly reminds people of Partition Magic, which is actually a good thing. QtParted is far from being identical to PM but it retains the basic concept of the user interface. It shows the way partitions are arranged on the hard drive in a colored and scaled chart-like view.

The chart is located in the upper right part of the interface. For partition types that are writable, the program can detect how much data is written on it and it fills that amount with a yellow color. The remaining space is shown in white. The rectangle associated with each partition displays in the upper left corner a small icon which indicates what type of operating system uses that filesystem. Because writing on NTFS partitions is hardly supported in Linux, QtParted paints this type of partition in red. The swap partitions are painted in blue. Right clicking a partition shows the available actions that can be performed on it.

Below the chart is a list-box that displays all the partitions and some information related to them. When selecting an item in the list-box the corresponding rectangle is automatically selected and vice versa. This way you can better understand what partition you are about to alter and minimizes the probability for mistakes. The list-box displays the number, partition, type, status, size, the used space if it's possible, where it starts, where it ends and the label that is assigned to it. Partitions can be arranged in this list, clicking on the criteria you want to use.

All the devices detected are shown in the upper left part of the program. If you have more than one device you will also use this to select the one you want to work with.

In the lower left corner additional drive information is shown for the selected drive: model, capacity (shown in MB) and whether the drive is busy or not. To be able to work with a partition it should be unmounted.

Currently QtParted has no help available. It is not hard at all to figure out on your own what you have to do, but some well documented error messages would be really nice to have. In Partition Magic those where really useful.

The Good

The resemblance with Partition Magic is a big plus. Support for almost all filesystems out there makes it a very powerful tool. The ease of use of the graphical interface and its power are well combined to allow less experienced users to do more complex tasks.

The Bad

This program doesn't even have an attempt of a manual and at least a basic one would be nice. There isn't an easy way to unmount the partitions from this program and some users might just get stuck at this point.

The Truth

QtParted opens new possibilities to Linux newbies, but the lack of documentation might turn out to be very bad in case of unexpected errors. At the moment, the software is maintained by the Ark Linux team and hopefully at some point it will be as good as the notorious Partition Magic.


Check out the screenshots below: