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Patrick Verner released a new version of his Parted Magic distribution for disk partitioning, cloning, rescue and benchmarking stuff with some major under-the-hood changes.
It’s been three months since the last Parted Magic update and the new version (2020_08_23) is here with some major changes. First and foremost, this is the first release of the disk partitioning distribution that no longer offers support for 32-bit computers.
The 32-bit kernel has been removed due to an initramfs size limitation in syslinux. Moreover, both 32 and 64 entries were removed from the boot menu as only 64-bit is now supported.
The developer was planning to remove 32-bit support in a future release.
“I was forced to drop the 32-bit kernel after finding out syslinux has an initramfs size limitation,” explains Patrick Verner. “I will include an old version with a 32-bit kernel. You can download it from your file list. 32-bit was going to be dropped in the near future anyway.”
The second major change in this new Parted Magic release is that the AUFS union file system implementation is now longer used. In its place, the distro now uses OverlayFS, a more modern union mount filesystem implementation for Linux. This is good news because kernel updates will no longer be delayed.
Another major change is the kernel bump to Linux 5.8 series, which means better support for running Parted Magic on newer hardware. The latest Linux 5.8.3 kernel is included in this release.
Among other updated components, Parted Magic now ships with ZFS on Linux 0.8.4, sudo 1.8.31p2, btrfs-progs 5.7, BIND 9.11.22, Mozilla Firefox 68.11 ESR, GnuTLS 3.6.14, ntp 4.2.8p15, SANE 1.0.30, cURL 7.72.0, Adobe Flash Player 32.0.0.414, nvme-cli 1.12, dislocker 0.7.1, getdevinfo 1.1.0, libexif 0.6.22, libjpeg-turbo 2.0.5, libvorbis 1.3.7, and ca-certificates-20200630.
Parted Magic still costs money. To download version 2020_08_23 you must pay the developer $11 USD, which I think is a small price to help him continue the development of one of the most popular and complete disk management solution. You can purchase Parted Magic 2020_08_23 from the official website.
Image: Patrick Verner
Last updated 4 years ago
