[PLUG] Partition Magic Clone

[Vincent Damewood]

Greetings Everyone,

 During this month's PLUG meeting I proposed an idea
for a Partition Magic clone. People gave a few
pointers to already existing projects that do similar
things.

 I have googled for what I could, and I am still in
the same situation that I was in, though I now have
more code to study.

 My situation is this: One of the sources of problems
that new users have when seting up Linux for the first
time is that they usually have to repartition their
Hard Drive. I, myself, had this problem.

 The actual problem is that most newbies don't know
much about partitions. It would be easy enough to
stick in a recent version of Red Hat and do an
automatic partition, but often, new users wish to keep
Windows.

 The next alternative is FIPS, that is nice for what
it does, but there are still problems with it. One can
also try GNU parted, but after trying it, it's not
that easy for a newbie (I found it 'easy enough' for
my own use).

 The other option is Partition Magic. Partition Magic
is quite a piece of software. It can do all the MS
type partitions and Linux partitions. It has an
excelent user interface, and even the text version it
pretty good. But it's proprietary. And I'm sick of
wondering "How do they do that?!", and having a(n)
EULA thrown into my face.

 GNU Parted is close to what I was thinking: You pop
in a disk and boot it. The thing starts up and you can
do your work. But the user interface isn't that good
for newbies and it doesn't have support for all the
file systems that PartMag does.

 So basicly, I want to make a PartMag clone, with the
exception that it will be *slightly* different, in a
better way. I don't know how yet, but that's the plan.

 Anyway I need hackers, coders, testers, and any other
form of help. If anyone can help, it would be
appreciated. If anyone knows of some other program,
tool, or other source of information, please tell me
about it.

That's about it. Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
Vincent Damewood


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