A year after the previous 1.7 release, GParted, the well-known free and open-source partition management tool for Linux, has officially launched version 1.8.
Several crash scenarios have been resolved, including failures caused by missing icon resources and crashes in CommandStatus when the application is compiled without optimization. Long-standing hangs related to setting FAT file system labels, particularly when the label matched a root directory entry, have also been fixed.
File system operations are now safer and more consistent. GParted now erases file system signatures before all file system copy operations, reducing the risk of conflicts or residual metadata during partition duplication.
On top of that, copy and paste handling has been improved to correctly preserve GPT partition type GUIDs and to maintain the EFI System Partition type when copying to a new partition. The tool also now displays explicit warnings for logical EFI System Partitions.
Several fixes target correctness in edge cases. GParted no longer disables 64-bit support on ext4 file systems smaller than 16 TiB, resolves issues where UI labels were not updated when newer jobs were queued for the same partition, and corrects the expansion behavior of details in the “Applying pending operations” dialog.
Plus, error reporting for FAT label operations has also been improved to avoid misleading messages.
Apart from that, additional changes include creating mount points inside a private temporary working directory, using a fixed-width font for command output in operation details, setting the LBA flag when creating FAT16, FAT32, or extended partitions on MSDOS partition tables, and updating screenshots in the GParted manual and its translations.
For more information, see the announcement. The source tarballs and details on all changes are available on GParted’s SourceForge page.
