Disks

Introduction

It would be nice to have an end-user oriented application that can be used to view and modify storage details on local and removable devices.

Designers

• DavidZeuthen

Status

• GNOME Disk Utility (née Palimpsest) and its underlying engine, udisks, is currently being rewritten

  • See the udisks2-port branch of gnome-disk-utility (link) and udisks master (link)

  • See David's fdo page for screenshots (updated frequently)

Objectives

Goals

• View local and removable storage devices
• View partitions and filesystems
• Format disks and media
  • USB keys, card readers, flash media, disk drives
  • Support encryption to keep data private (e.g. LUKS or others)
• Modify disk partition layouts
  • Create/delete filesystems and partitions
  • Edit filesystems and partitions (resize, change label)
• Disk images
  • Create/restore disk images for disk/volumes
  • Access disk image files (including ISO files)
• Edit system configuration
  • Activate specific devices at OS start-up (fstab/crypttab)
• View hardware problems (SMART)

Non Goals

• Advanced / enterprise storage management
  • LVM
  • RAID
• Every use-case under the sun
  • It's perfectly fine to tell advanced users to use the command-line

Relevant Art

Mac OS X

Windows

GNOME 2

GParted

See GParted Screenshots

Discussion

Tentative Design

Comments

See Also