A preview of GNOME Disks 3.8

GNOME Disks (aka gnome-disk-utility) hasn’t bumped to version 3.7 but it has an impressive development and all credits go to David Zeuthen (on the left) who is also senior maintainer at udisks.

Already there are many new features like multiple-selections, the re-designed RAID creation and others, though it is still far from completed. 

The first thing you will notice after opening GNOME-Disks is the new select button that comes in m any new GNOME Apps.
We can select multiple images and perform multiple-actions at once, like deleting partitions. However that doesn’t seem to work right at the moment.

Adding new images is now available only from the Application Menu. By the way for those who don’t know GNOME Disks can benchmark your disks.

My Intel scores much lower than its factory specifications; one more case that big companies “befool” consumers ..or it is a GNOME bug? :)

Because I couldn’t try most of the things like RAID Arrays creation, everything bellow is from David’s Google Plus

Add a unit combo-box to the create partition dialog | Nov 30

You can now completely control the size when creating a partition in Disks (who says GNOME isn’t optimized for tweakers?!?). More importantly, with this feature in place, we can default to a better unit so you can type 700 instead of 700000 if you want to use 70% of your 1TB disk #ItsTheLittleThings

See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=689362and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=643159 for discussion.

Power Off Disks | Nov 19

Disks 3.4 lost the ability to power off drives but fear not because I just added this back for 3.8. Implementation-wise – like in 3.4 – only USB is supported and it works by de-configuring the device and then removing the power to the port it is plugged into, see

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git;a=commit;h=253e05724f9230910344357b1142ad8642ff9f5a

for details. On the handful of devices I’ve tested this with it works as expected – the LED on the enclosure / usb stick is turned off.

Honestly I’m not sure how useful this feature really is (and unlike GNOME < 3.4 we’re not going to hook it into the eject button in the Shell, Files or the File Chooser) but a lot of people have been complaining that it’s gone. For screenshots, see

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-power-off-drive-1.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-power-off-drive-2.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-power-off-drive-3.png

and note in the last one how we take special care to inform the user that other drives are powered down if e.g. trying to power down a drive that is part of a 4-in-1 card reader USB device.

A list of affected devices | Nov 9

Some users been complaining that they accidentally lost data using Disks so today I added a list of affected devices to various confirmation dialogs.

I know, I know, it’s not ideal – we all know confirmation dialogs don’t really work because users just click through them without reading – and something like anUndo Cluebar would be much better. But also pretty much impossible to sanely implement given the low-level nature of the application. Still worth thinking about, though.

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-confirmation-dialog-shows-affected-devices-1.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-confirmation-dialog-shows-affected-devices-2.png

Inhibit suspend whilst creating disk image | Oct 17

Disks will now inhibit suspend/logout whilst creating/restoring disk images. It’s a small detail, but, hey, you know what they say:  #EveryDetailMatters
https://live.gnome.org/EveryDetailMatters

“Create Disk Image” feature tolerate read errors | Oct 16

Just made GNOME Disks’ “Create Disk Image” feature tolerate read errors. It’s not yet completely as smart as things like GNU ddrescue but we can easily add that in the future if we want to. There’s more info in the commit

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-disk-utility/commit/?id=5762bd304c14332644d2f5bdc96cfce29f4dbfcd

and in these screenshots

http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-create-disk-image-ft-1.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-create-disk-image-ft-2.png
http://people.freedesktop.org/~david/gnome-disks-create-disk-image-ft-3.png

As evident in the screenshots, I used md(4)’s FAULTY module when hacking on the feature but it also works great with one of my Northern Exposure DVDs (8.1 GB data – 130ish MB unreadable).

Create Raid Array | Oct 12

First cut of the “Create RAID Array” in GNOME Disks. Now I’m wondering if the “Create RAID Array” dialog should also have a way for the user to create a filesystem since it’s what you want 95% of the time (the other 5% includes using the resulting RAID array as a member device for RAID or LVM). Answers on a postcard, please!

We had mentioned all these before, but I just put them all together in a single post. Almost all, because there are many smaller improvements in GNOME Disks. However I cannot correctly run it, so I cannot try it at the moment.

You can catch David in his G+