Gparted upgraded

April 29, 2009 — BarryK

The Woof builds so far have used the Gparted PET package from Puppy4.

I am prompted to upgrade as Gparted is not working very well. Perhaps there is a mismatch with the later libparted. When I tell it to scan my laptop hard drive, it remains busy forever scanning.

A problem that has prevented me from upgrading is that Gparted requires the gtkmm libraries, which are huge. This has prevented me from using the Gparted packages that come with the compatible-distros.

Furthermore, the gtkmm libraries packages provided with the compatible distros do not include '.a' static library files. So, to compile Gparted with static gtkmm libraries and hence get a reasonably small package, I have to go through the whole exercise of compiling them. I have done this in Jaunty pup. Here is how:

cairomm-1.8.0

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=i486-pc-linux-gnu  --disable-docs --enable-static --disable-shared



glibmm-2.20.0

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=i486-pc-linux-gnu  --disable-fulldocs --enable-static --disable-shared



pangomm-2.24

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=i486-pc-linux-gnu  --disable-docs --enable-static --disable-shared



gtkmm-2.16.0

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=i486-pc-linux-gnu  --disable-docs --enable-static --disable-shared --disable-demos



libuuid

missing, needed! this is part of 'e2fsprogs' but ubuntu doesn't seem to have the 'dev' component (include files, uuid.pc, libuuid.so).

...I had compiled binary in T2, grabbed dev components from there.



gparted-0.4.4

# ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var --build=i486-pc-linux-gnu --disable-doc  --disable-scrollkeeper

# make

# new2dir make install

The new Gparted 0.4.4 works fine. Note, the package is still big. The Gparted executable itself is 3282KB, most of that being the gtkmm component. I would like to encourage developers not to use gtkmm! -- there are much more efficient ways of coding with a OO layer over GTK, for example by coding in Vala.

Well, I had a personal Woofathon tonight, or rather, this morning -- it's now 3am, better hit the sack.

Comments

"When I tell it to scan my laptop hard drive, it remains busy forever scanning. "

Re: no fdd
Username: BarryK
"No, it isn't. My laptop does not have the floppy interface and Gparted is not delayed at startup by the non-existent floppy. When I start gparted with a drive on the commandline: # gparted /dev/sda then gparted will only scan that drive at startup. The above command is what I did and it hung scanning forever. The same Gparted works fine in 412, hangs forever in Jaunty. It appears to be a mismatch with the later libparted in jaunty, probably. The problem has gone away with Gparted 0.4.4.

Tags: woof