Partition Logic 0.85 Released
Posted: Fri Jan 24, 2020 12:40 am
It's been a while, so it's time for a major update!
Version 0.85 is now available from the download page: https://partitionlogic.org.uk/download/
Version 0.85 is now available from the download page: https://partitionlogic.org.uk/download/
Overview: This major release offers an updated look, touchscreen support, better widescreen viewing, and improved performance. It includes FAT filesystem resizing, mouse scroll-wheel integration, better EXT4 filesystem handling, RAM disk boot support, improved internationalization including Russian and Turkish translations, and an OHCI (USB 1) driver.
- The Disk Manager now has the option to write a new, empty partition table, of any supported type (currently DOS/MBR and GPT).
- The Disk Manager can now copy disks and partitions even when there are read or write errors; this way it can be used to recover data from a failing disk. If a large read or write operation fails, after prompting the user about whether to continue, it will restart from the failure point and attempt each sector of the failed operation individually.
- The Disk Manager now has a checkbox in graphics mode, to show or hide removable disks. It is un-checked by default.
- The Disk Manager now offers a way to view ‘raw’ partition table data via the new ‘Disk info’ item in the Disk menu.
- The Disk Manager now shows slices for reserved areas, instead of showing all un-partitioned space as empty.
- Added FAT filesystem resizing capability.
- All of the desktop background (wallpaper) images are new.
- There are new default colours, making for a slightly darker theme.
- The welcome screen has had a facelift; it’s now a full-screen window with a new splash image.
- Window title bars are thicker, and checkboxes and radio buttons have been enlarged.
- Added a System Diagnostics (‘sysdiag’) program for testing memory and disks.
- Added support for deep EXT4 extent inodes.
- The operating system loader now attempts to select a video mode that matches the hardware’s native/best aspect ratio, for wide-screen displays. The user can override this in the Display Settings window, or at boot time by pressing ‘Esc’ during kernel loading, and selecting a mode from a menu.
- Added RAM disk booting for coreboot/SeaBIOS support in Qemu, and potentially PXE booting in the future. Create an empty file named ‘ramdisk’ in the root directory of the boot floppy image to trigger this feature.
- Significantly re-engineered the ‘Edit’ text editor program. It’s much more realistically usable now: it mostly works, supports the Home, End, and PgUp, and PgDown keys, and no longer does automatic line-wrapping, although it doesn’t yet support horizontal scrolling.
- The USB 3 XHCI driver now supports 64-bit contexts.
- Updated translation strings in the kernel message files, and in the Disk Manager’s German message file.
- Increased the SCSI USB disk driver’s read/write timeout so that it’s proportional to the number of sectors being operated upon.
- The floppy disk driver now has a workaround to handle broken emulation software (VMware) that always sets the ‘media changed’ bit. Previously the filesystem layer would interpret this as the media having been removed.
- Added a Virtual Keyboard (‘keyboard’) program for touchscreen input, which can also be clicked with the mouse. It is started automatically in an iconified mode when touchscreen hardware has been detected. The icon shows in the right corner of the top taskbar menu, and can be tapped/clicked to show or hide the virtual keyboard.
- The ‘clock’ program has been updated so that it shows as a label in the top taskbar menu, rather than a small window at the bottom of the screen.
- The mouse pointer can now be hidden (for touch operation).
- Added USB touchscreen support and a touchscreen abstraction layer, akin to but distinct from the generic mouse functionality.
- Added an OHCI (USB 1) host controller driver. All 4 USB controller types are now supported.
- The XHCI (USB 3) driver is now aware of extra ‘scratchpad buffer’ bits introduced in the 1.1 specification.
- Added a new Russian translation, and fonts and character set data for iso-8859-5 (Russian).
- Added a new Turkish translation, and fonts and character set data for iso-8859-9 (Turkish).
- Added Russian and Turkish keyboard mappings.
- Added scrolling to the text-mode vshCursorMenu so that we can use it to do things like partition type selection for MS-DOS labels in the Disk Manager (has way too many choices for the current vshCursorMenu).
- Fixed: The Disk Manager now checks for mounted partitions before doing ‘delete all’.
- Fixed: The ‘clock’ program was was showing the weekday (+1) and day of the month (-1) incorrectly since 0.77.
- Fixed: The EXT filesystem driver’s interpretation of the inode ‘blocks’ field was incorrect.
- Fixed: EHCI handling of full-speed USB 2.0 hubs was incorrect due to an error in the specification.
- Fixed: A small issue in the setting of endpoint contexts while configuring XHCI device slots.
- Fixed: A bug in the XHCI driver in which certain class-specific device requests could be confused with standard USB requests. In particular, setting keyboard lights would cause keyboard devices to be erroneously re-configured.
- Fixed: When installed in ‘basic’ mode, the Disk Manager would emit a spurious error message attempting to load its icon image.
- Fixed: When installed in ‘basic’ mode, all filesystem format operations were failing, since libntfs was being dynamically linked to the format program. Both the Disk Manager and the format program now use dlopen()/dlsym() to check whether ntfsFormat() is available, and act accordingly (i.e. NTFS formatting is not available in ‘basic’ installations, but formatting other filesystem types is supposed to work).
- Fixed: The kernel API and EXT filesystem driver were returning 64-bit values incorrectly. The userspace filesystemGetFreeBytes() function wasn’t working for values of > 32 bits.
- Fixed: The AHCI SATA driver no longer calls the multitasker to wait for I/O when multitasking is not enabled (e.g. during initial disk enumeration).
- Fixed – The FAT filesystem driver no longer refuses to read a directory if it can’t count the clusters of every file. A corrupt file could render whole directory trees inaccessible, or if in the root directory, could cause the filesystem to become unmountable, and the system unbootable.
- … Plus dozens of other improvements to the Visopsys operating system (see https://visopsys.org/download/change-log/)