1.1 Project description

`Partition Surprise' is a PowerQuest Partition Magic-like GPL clone for Linux. Partition resizes, moves and conversions are implemented. Limited support of operations on mounted ext2-filesystem is included as well.

Project features

Partition Surprise contains full support for changing partition structure of disks. The implemented features are following:

1. Partition structure editing: creating, deleting, wiping, moving and copying of all types of partitions changing filesystem types of partitions.
2. Obtaining filesystem information: obtaining information on filesystems (its size, internal parameters,...).
3. Resizing partitions: growing and shrinking of not-mounted ext2 and fat-based filesystems resizing and conversion of partition in one step.
4. Conversion of filesystems: filesystem conversion between ext2, fat12, (v)fat16 and (v)fat32 changing internal parameters of filesystems (size of clusters in fat-filesystems, number of inodes and blocksize in ext2-filesystem).
5. On-line support of resizing ext2-partitions: full support of resizing of mounted ext2-partitions development of kernel patches for linux kernel 2.4.x for this feature.
6. Internationalization support: GNU gettext based internationalization support english and czech version catalogs.
7. LILO support: automatic changing LILO information after substantial modifications to be able to boot successfully.
8. Different user interfaces:
   • command-line user-interface,
   • GTK+/Gnome user-interface,
   • Curses/S-Lang user-interface.

Portability issues

GNU C compiler is required for successful compilation of the product. The product is POSIX-compliant and thus it will be able to run on different unices where gcc is available.

Future possibilities

The whole product is modularized, thus it will be not difficult to add support for another filesystem and new user interfaces.

Licensing

The resulting product is released under GPL license and carrying SuSE copyrights.