from the even-newer-and-shinier,-but-not-a-catchy-name dept.
TheMukt reports
Developer Vratislav Podzimek announced the next-gen partition manager for Fedora, blivet-gui. It is eventually going to replace GParted, the most popular GUI based partition manager found in all major distros. The new tool is named blivet-gui, as it is based on the blivet python library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration tool).
The need of a new partition manager is [rooted in] the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all the modern storage technologies. Fedora's Anaconda base supports all and is hence chosen as the back-end for this new intuitive tool. The application is only a few months old but is already looking nice and useful. Features like RAID and BTRFS support are being worked on. Vojtech Trefny is the other developer working with Vratislav on blivet-gui.
The look and feel closely follows that of GParted so that users experience a familiar interface. blivet-gui also handles tasks in the same way GParted does -- add tasks one by one and then press the "Apply" button.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:59PM
What is the thought process here to not to make gparted do what is needed? Is it a reinvent 'just because'? Or is there some underlying problem with gparted? I am seriously missing something here...
(Score: 2, Informative) by arachnist on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:04PM
That's the "problem" "solving" approach at fedora lately. They reinvent everything and make things worse.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:12PM
That's the "problem" "solving" approach at fedora lately. They reinvent everything and make things worse.
Seems to be working for systemd. I'm just waiting for the alternative OS list to read: Unix/ (GNU)Linux/ Potternix(systemd).
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:22PM
I would positively love for your vision to come true. Muddying up things with most distros just entirely jumping away from sysvinit for systemd, rather than supporting both in separate branches, is an absolute catastrophe if you ask me. Not against making new software by any means (even if existing software works fine, no reason a little intellectual exercise is problematic), but watching as distro after distro just decided to treat their users like playthings has been pretty telling as far as figuring out which distros are worth sticking with, safe in the knowledge that your next update won't entirely replace the system you've configured and gotten working with a total replacement with experimental software, for no real reason other than that the distro maintainers got bored (or, because they do everything Redhat does, and Redhat was bored).
The reason I worry we won't see the fork approach used much though is that everyone knows damn well that unless you force systemd onto people who don't realize they have a choice, the user base will consist of about 20 people. And here I was thinking that the Free Software community was the place to go so as NOT to be manipulated and toyed with by the developers of your software...how naive...
(Score: 3, Informative) by DECbot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @11:30PM
I think it will come true, but not as I hoped. Red Hat shat systemd onto the world. No big deal, just RH distros will have to suffer through the hell-spawn of pulse-audio, dbus, udev, and gnome3. No big deal. Arch and Suse submitting to systemd raised my eyebrow. There was no need for that. And then Ubuntu abandons Upstart and adopts systemd. That was annoying, but I can move my systems to Debian. I've already moved one server over, when 12.04 drops support I'll move the other server, the desktop, and the laptop over. And then Debian drops the turd in the punch bowl: systemd is coming to Debian! Sure, with a systemd shim and a bunch of forum documented tweaking, you can keep initv, but don't expect us, the mighty Debian Technical Committee, to like it. The largest distros have jumped ship and swam over to systemd, leaving Gentoo and Slackware as the remaining large distros not adopting systemd as the primary init system. I really expected systemd to remain within Red Hat, Ubuntu, and their derivatives. The way I see it, the two alternative OS camps {BSDs & Linux} have already split to three {BSDs / Linux(systemd) / Linux(!systemd)}. We are just waiting for the other shoe to drop making the split official: porting between Linux(systemd) and Linux(!systemd) is a F-PITA.
I don't mind Red Hat doing their own thing. What bugs me is when all the other distros follow suit in a manner that removes choice. RH switching to blivet-gui doesn't necessarily mean that Debian will do the same. But given the momentum within the distro committees as of late, I don't trust the other distros to blaze their own path. I really shouldn't be bitching about a partition utility, but RH now has the power to make systemd depend on BTRFS, which would now require blivet-gui. Why not just add BTRFS support to GParted? It is a reliable tool that the community is familiar with. Pay the responsible developers to add support to your favored file system. That way the entire ecosystem is improved, not the rock you're lording over.
In another SN article, someone joked that systemd was the One Ring to bind all the distros to Sauron^wRed Hat. I'm starting to think that it was not a joke.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by cykros on Monday September 15 2014, @08:53PM
Perhaps it's just Palpatine (same number of syllables as Potteridge, and they both start with a P!) fostering a war of separatists v. the Red-Hat Republic, aiming to defeat those that attempted secession and in so doing create a new Linux Empire.
Naturally, we must use the Force in opposing our Sith would be overlords. Occasionally, that means compiling from source sometimes.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mechanicjay on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:24PM
I was going to say pretty much the same thing, thanks for saving me the trouble. I think they just have a bad case of NIH syndrome, which is ultimately not helpful.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:34PM
Perhaps adding such functionality to gparted was too much work. Have you looked at the gparted code to see how easy of a task this is? I bet you have not. Neither have I. But from experience I have found that sometimes it is better to start fresh than to hack up an existing code base. Things can start to get ugly really fast.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:40PM
But from experience I have found that sometimes it is better to start fresh
That can be true sometimes. However, I have also see that as a way to re-do something just because you think it is 'ugly'. Not because you do not understand the code. If you are going to re-write it you *BETTER* understand what the old code did. I have seen both. Unfortunately more often than not 'its ugly' is a very poor reason to re-write something. Everyone elses code is ugly except your own...
http://blog.codinghorror.com/pretty-code-ugly-code/ [codinghorror.com]
I bet you have not.
I didnt think it was broken... As its whole job is pretty much to write about 50-60 bytes into particular sectors on a drive then call other libraries to format the chunk of bytes.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:55PM
"Fedora" and "thought process" should not appear in the same web zone together.
Remember in 2007 (I think) when Wal-Mart had a Linux-powered gPC? No? Well, they did, and I got one to support Linux. Big mistake. I thought the machine was a plot to discredit Linux. It ran a wholly worthless Linux distro no one had ever heard of. The hardware wasn't bad, and I wiped it and put then-Ubuntu on it with KDE, and it was a nice little desktop. Why wouldn't Wal-Mart sell a box with a usable Linux distro? Had to be a plot! Back then I imagined Microsoft or someone behind the awful Linux distro.
Now I'm starting to think the same thing about Fedora. They've been taken over somehow by people who want to destroy Linux as a viable platform, and are using Fedora/Red Hat to do it. The past few years have been one thing after another to the point they're not just making some mistakes.
Sure, I don't like conspiracy theories. But how else can you explain what's going on besides a conspiracy theory?
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:06PM
"They've been taken over somehow by people who want to destroy Linux as a viable platform"
Embrace Extend Extinguish
(Score: 4, Insightful) by strattitarius on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:55PM
At least give it a decent name! PartMan, DiskDivider, PartDisk, GDisk, GPLDisk, FedoraPartition, FParter... I could go on for days. But they stuck with the name of the library it is based on... and we wonder why the suits don't like it. What the F$SK is "blivet" and why would I think to use that to partition a disk?
Slashdot Beta Sucks. Soylent Alpha Rules. News at 11.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday September 09 2014, @07:23PM
The standard definition of "blivet" is "10 lbs. of shit in a 5 lb. bag". This seems to validate your theory, though.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:08PM
This is the type of article it is important to have here. Now I will have a vague memory of what to Google when I come across this or a partitioning problem GParted can't solve.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by d on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:17PM
With the current approach, wait half a year and this partition manager will be a systemd dependency and a year later they'll be trying to make some of its code a kernel module. It's like GNU - all code is going to be ours, except for the kernel (which is in the way). SystemD/Linux FTW!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:05PM
NSA approved!
(Score: 1) by canopic jug on Tuesday September 09 2014, @06:14PM
When enough critical system components are inextricably tied to systemd, they'll flip the DRM switch. Or make up some tempest in a teapot, like happened with Mozilla, to drive out key defenders of the open way.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 5, Informative) by E_NOENT on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:05PM
Yep.
The hits keep coming from RedHat. My social media feed is now filling up with soon-to-be-former GNU/Linux users who are talking about moving to high ground (Slackware, LFS, Gentoo, the *BSDs).
Perhaps the high-water mark for the GNU/Linux movement was some time ago; since the arrival of UEFI, udev, dbus, Mono, jackbooted GNOME thugs, systemd, and now...blivet-gui...ya just gotta wonder WTF is going on.
It's almost as if all the fun has finally been squeezed out of it. That's bad news.
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:04PM
Maybe having the fun squeezed out of it is a good thing?
I've been using predominately Linux on my home PCs since '05. I still find LVM and RAID a PITA. Typically when I'm doing a system installation from scratch it's after something buggered up the hardware and I'm not in the mood to figure out LVM issues, let alone btrfs options.
Having a nice GUI to handle this would be nice. Would love for it to be in gparted, but it's technically not a partition issue. If you can point me towards a simple to use GUI tool to handle RAID, LVM, and various modern filesystem options (mirroring parts of the file tree, etc), I'm all for it.
If not, let's see what this has to offer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:51PM
I'm not sure more people moving to Slackware is bad news. The package management system is fantastic; biggest issue most people using it run into that really snags things up is when they realize that X program just isn't packaged yet (either as a Slackbuild script over at Slackbuilds.org to be installed with sbopkg (which DOES, contrary to popular belief, have support for dependency checking as an optional feature for those who prefer it), or as a binary .t?z package to be grabbed from one of the third party repos to be managed with slackpkg+). While experienced users usually can handle writing a Slackbuild script (there are fantastic templates, usually making it so all you do is specify specific configure flags in the script), it can definitely be a little daunting for new folks (or more realistically, folks who either don't know about the fantastic documentation Slackware has, or who can't be bothered to read it, preferring the mess of forum based support that has become the norm, with terrible portability for that advice from version to version or distro to distro).
I do find it appalling though that Debian got sucked into this mess. Ubuntu, I expect this kind of bovine excrement from, but Debian's been a respectable hobbyist distro for long enough that I'd have thought they'd show a little more restraint (or, just do the responsible thing, and have Debian GNU/Linux alongside Debian systemd/Linux). At the very least, they do still package sysvinit, and if you can be bothered, it is still possible to have a sysvinit based Debian installation as opposed to using the default systemd. Perhaps the real answer, rather than boycotting the systemd distros, then, is to floor their repos with requests for sysvinit, showing that people would rather go out of their way to fix what the distro broke than allow themselves to be yanked around. If someone were to package up a script that handles this process easily, and it were carried out on a large enough scale, I wonder if the folks checking the repo server log files might start to take a hint...
(Score: 1) by E_NOENT on Wednesday September 10 2014, @12:14AM
Totally agree--I didn't mean to imply moving to Slackware was a *bad* thing at all. "Bob" forbid, I use it on all my machines exclusively!
That being said, it's an ominous noose that's tightening (I expect this from RedHat, but Debian capitulating, as you pointed out, is a bad sign), but it also puts pressure on the remaining distros to someday conform.
Here's alien Bob -- is KDE next to "go systemd?"
http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/on-lkml-an-open-letter-to-the-linux-world/ [slackbook.org]
I'm not in the business... I *am* the business.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @10:45PM
I guess they want to pull a Canonical, ytrying to make their distro unique as much as possible. Canonical did it at GUI level, and people just grafted better GUIs over the system, and screwed them. Redhat took note and probably asked themselves: we can't fork the kernel, nobody would follow us, what's the next important thing? the bootloader? nah... Let's mess with PID 1 instead. Thus systemd was born. And the only time where Canonical should have stood its ground (which would have caused a painful but ultimately useful decoupling and standardization of interfaces with init), instead, caved in. Maybe the NSA had a talk with them.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by SDRefugee on Wednesday September 10 2014, @06:20PM
The hits keep coming from RedHat. My social media feed is now filling up with soon-to-be-former GNU/Linux users who are talking about moving to high ground (Slackware, LFS, Gentoo, the *BSDs).
No flippin' kidding!! I started my Linux "career" back in 1994 on Slackware, and damned if it doesn't look like I need to head back there again.. Over the years, I'd gone from Slackware to Redhat when it first came out, and then moved to Fedora Core when Redhat got all "enterprise-y".. In 2007, a friend introduced me to the "newish kid on the block", namely Ubuntu, and I went over to that.. Stayed there till they went into the crapper, with that abortion, Unity.. Moved to Debian and they're shoving this turd called systemd down our throats.. Apparently EVERYbody is onboard with this abortion, save Patrick over at Slackware.. Hey Pat??? One of your oldtimie users is comin' back to the fold... Rumor has it Patrick detests systemd as much as many of us do...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:14PM
Are you sure it is not already dependent on systemd?
It says it has a GUI. I guess that means it has only a GUI (because after all, the command line is "too complicated" for "normal" users). And I guess the GUI used is written using GNOME (the screenshot reinforces that assumption). That makes a GNOME dependency. But GNOME is dependent on dbus. And if I understand correctly, dbus has been merged into systemd.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:55PM
Nice job illustrating the issues with systems being based on DEPENDENCIES (which a human specifies, and often require more than is necessary) vs. having the necessary LIBRARIES (which are dictated by what the program actually makes calls to in order to run).
This should totally be usable without requiring systemd, but at the same time, you might have to do some editing of the rpm files at the very least in order to force it to run, if not just bust out your trust gcc...
(Score: 2) by efitton on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:34PM
Read the mailing list on this one. He's upset that aren't just using the GNOME disk manager. His warm and fuzzy personality comes through. Apparently not nearly enough embrace, extend, extinguish enough.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @10:49PM
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MrGuy on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:18PM
"The need of a new partition manager is [rooted in] the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all the modern storage technologies...(snip)...Features like RAID and BTRFS support are being worked on" (emphasis mine)
OK, I'll give you BTRFS is new and evolving tech. But since when is RAID some kind of newfangled technological wizardry?
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:05PM
"But since when is RAID some kind of newfangled technological wizardry?"
Maybe they're talking about the Russian Nesting Doll thing that happens with LVM and RAID where right off the top of my head I can think of and have at one time or another deployed
1) LVM on software RAID, which is a PITA at upgrade time when you slap in bigger physical disks
2) software RAID on LVM, which is slightly less painful but expansions are still a PITA
3) LVM mirroring on LVM, which isn't really all that popular and there's something were performance is bad unless you have three drives, two mirrored data and one separate drive for the journal and then you can survive any form of single drive disaster. Although no one does it so its not talked about much. I find this to be the easiest to use but it can be a bit confusing and there's that whole "must use 3 drives" thing.
Maybe more options!
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:10PM
Oh how could I have forgotten this one:
4) First, start drinking heavily, this is like the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy you're not gonna survive this one sober. So you got #3 the LVM mirroring of 3 partitions with two on each drive plus a tiny journal for the other. How to combine three partitions into one big system? I know, software linear raid on top of LVM on top of LVM mirrored partitions. Or something like that. I was never crazy enough to implement this.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DECbot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:41PM
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:53PM
Its actually even sicker as my basement server has filesystems in files for virtualization, and I store my passwords and stuff in encfs format on dropbox.
Another weird / sick one is disk image for dosbox with an obscure msdos only app thats 20 yrs old that lives on top of that pile and is exported via X windows to my desktop to run. Maybe I wouldn't play video games that way but for an obscure engineering text mode program its not totally insane.
My head is spinning about how many virtualizations are on top of each other from top to bottom.
I miss MVS/360 where you just define cylinders in some JCL to store a file and thats it, not 50 layers of indirection. Or CPM where theres not even directories, just flatfile. Ah the good old days, back when things actually worked.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:19PM
It's virtualizations all the way down.
(Score: 2) by efitton on Tuesday September 09 2014, @10:46PM
*sigh* When you post anonymously you don't get moderated up nearly as often. And this clearly should be moderated +1 funny.
(Score: 1) by pendorbound on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:33PM
So I need a full Python system working before I can partition a disk? Seems a bit misguided in rescue scenarios…
C is a nice language. Good for writing small tools that tend to work when you need them, especially when a system might be in less than full functioning order. Python? Not so much.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:56PM
"So I need a full Python system working before I can partition a disk? Seems a bit misguided in rescue scenarios…"
Even worse you need the GUI up not just python.
In the olden times when you installed Debian off punchcards I occasionally did major drive modifications using parted (not gparted, just parted) because I'd boot into text mode and then run parted's CLI to shrink or wriggle around partitions. Remember parted only edits partitions, its up to you to resize your FS if you're shrinking or expanding. I like how the EXT2 series has been hot-resizable while online since... I donno, many years now.
Starting like a decade ago I just make a LVM partition of the whole disk and then manipulate my "partitions" in LVM using lvm's tools. It works alright. And now at work most of my "partitions" live on the NAS and look like magical mptscsih devices and I don't get to manipulate my partitions, there's a demarc between us and them at that point, they run their nas, I run my systems, and we don't much talk to each other.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday September 09 2014, @07:09PM
I like python, and since Anaconda is written in it, I know a rescue disk should have little problem supporting it. Once you have gone with GUI with the X display and all the libs, simple and foolproof are already out the window. BUT:
I do wonder what's wrong with gdisk, mdadm, and mk*fs? They work well over a serial connection, have few dependencies (none if linked static) and get the job done.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tynin on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:34PM
Never really used gparted, but I'll be upset if they pry parted from my still warm hands.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by digitalaudiorock on Tuesday September 09 2014, @07:14PM
Agreed. Given the mindset of the RH / freedesktop crowd these days, I don't think they'll be happy until Linux is as devoid of command line utilities, and as loaded with bloated black-box-don't-look-behind-the-curtain GUIs as is Windows.
I used to be absolutely stunned at the unthinkable idea of moving to windows even log like binary logging, but with what I've seen developing with those folks, I'm now stunned that the didn't add a system registry.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @07:41PM
It would not surprise me if they had already created a registry and are biding their time to tell everyone about it.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by KiloByte on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:31PM
It's already a part of systemd :/
Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:46PM
I can handle this more than I can handle the systemd thingie, but I just looked at their site and it seems the software is still a bit alpha. Worse, a lot of what the article claims are blivet-gui's features are listed by the blivet-gui folks as 'not yet implemented.' Maybe this is a platform with more potential for adding in new file systems and such, but at present it doesn't seem it does much more than gparted does. That says, perhaps this is a step in the right direction? Let's stick around and see. (although yes, if it starts to drag in a lot of dependencies I"ll be disappointed too.).
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday September 09 2014, @05:02PM
"it seems the software is still a bit alpha"
This is an insightful problem in that I don't mind alpha level games or an alpha level mp3 player. But when the chips are down and I'm recovering from a disaster at 2am and I use this the first time, I don't want to be an alpha tester. So for "years" maybe I'll be using CLI parted unless they take it away from me.
You can always tell the pioneers because they got the arrows in their backs and all that.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:27PM
...Learn Slackware, Know Linux.
More and more this old adage has been seeing relevancy (and if you're newish to the Linux world, it was an extremely common thing to hear 15 years ago or so). Starting to think that Redhat could do well to adopt the Mad Hatter as their mascot, because the mercury seems to be getting to them.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday September 10 2014, @02:13AM
I love GNU parted and I love gparted, its GUI frontend. Don't you even TRY to touch it!
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 10 2014, @02:34AM
These partitioners also create fstab entries. I have yet to see one that includes 'discard' and the other options associated with SSDs. You'd think that by now someone would have covered that. WTF?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday September 10 2014, @07:10AM
No they don't. If they did every thumbdrive I partitioned would be in fstab. And I wouldn't have needed to edit fstab after merging or splitting partitions and keeping the same installation, as I often do.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 10 2014, @08:08AM
In line with systemd, wayland and the upcoming daemonhostd and registryd, this new partition tool will of course only support FAT32 and NTFS partitions.