GPartEd the open source harddisk partition editor

The storage capacity of today's harddisk is normally huge, and we usually subdivided it into one or more storage partitions.

GPartEd (Gnome Partition Editor) is an industrial-strength open source application for manipulating the harddisk partitions, which includes creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying them and the filesystems on them.

When and why we need to use GPartEd?

• When we plan to install another operating system in the computer for dual-booting, and need to allocate free partition space for the new operating system.
• When one of the partition space is almost fully utilized, while other still have plenty of space, and we need to reorganize the disk usage by repartitioning.
• When we want to copy data residing on harddisks and mirroring one partition with another (disk imaging).
• When we want to remove a Linux partition in a dual-boot computer, and make that partition available to Windows. Note that the Windows Disk Management Tool doesn't recognise Linux partition, so you need to use 3rd party tools like GPartEd for this purpose.
  

Please be aware that if any problem occurs to the harddisk partition tables, data might be lost and difficult to recover (and sometimes non-recoverable). Honestly, if you don't understand what I'm talking about in this post, and you are unsure what a "partition" is actually mean, then this tools is not for you to play around with.

It is prudent and advisable to always make a backup of your harddisk with Clonezilla that I've introduced earlier before you make any changes to the partitions.

GPartEd is available in LiveCD format (boot from CDROM) and also LiveUSB format (boot from USB thumb drive). It can also be run from network on PXE server. You do not need to install anything into your harddisk in order to use it.

Click here to look for documentations of GPartEd.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 is out

While the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 with new features and lots of improvement is still in beta testing, the stable version of OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 is now released.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 includes a security fix, minor enhancements, and bug fixes to all its core components. The 2.4 version branch of OpenOffice.org fixed a number of security vulnerabilities and all OpenOffice.org users using version 2.3 or below should upgrade to 2.4.1 to fix up the addressed security issues.

Click here for the detailed Release Notes of OpenOffice.org 2.4.1.

Click here to go to the download page of OpenOffice.org 2.4.1.

Clonezilla the open source harddisk partition cloning solution

Partition cloning has been a handy tools for many computer techies and users ever since the emergence of a famous software named as Ghost in 1996. Ghost is still around nowadays under the umbrella of Symantec. On the other hand, Acronis has produced their competing True Image products and has gained much popularity too.

Partition cloning software is useful for many purposes, such as:

• Backup and restore of the whole harddisk or partitions in the harddisk.
• Provisioning of standard set of software by cloning the harddisk or partition image from existing computer to another.
• Transferring data from one harddisk to another, eg. upgrade new harddisk to computer.
• Deploy testing, benchmarking or R&D computers, whereby the harddisk will be wiped out and restored to original state after the project.
• and many more...

Both Symantec Ghost and Acronis True Image are great tools, only that you need to purchase license for each of the computer that you're going to use them. There are other free and/or open source alternative solutions available, and I find Clonezilla developed by the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) in Taiwan is among the best.

There are 2 varieties of Clonezilla available, Clonezilla Live and Clonezilla Server Edition. Clonezilla Live is suitable for single machine backup and restore, while Clonezilla Server Edition is for massive deployment in corporate environment, whereby it can clone many computers simultaneously.

Multicast (a technology whereby a single image can be sent simultaneously to many machines without putting greater stress on the network than sending an image to a single machine) is supported in Clonezilla Server Edition. You can also remotely use it to save or restore a bunch of computers if PXE and Wake-on-LAN are supported.

Clonezilla is developed on Linux and based on a couple of open source projects such as DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast. You can boot from its live CD and use it directly.