LWN: Comments on "Parting is such sweet sorrow - The Optimistic Contributor's review of Parted Magic"

Parting is such sweet sorrow - The Optimistic Contributor's review of

npj — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 04:02:44 +0000

Looks like gparted-livecd is coming to an end too:
http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/news.php

Parting is such sweet sorrow - The Optimistic Contributor's review of Parted Magic

alext — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 10:22:23 +0000

The power is "the community". I thought that is one thing that says it all, there are so many
choices about where to add your contribution the choice is difficult. And I know lots gets
said about freedom, hence people setting out their own project and path; but contributing to
another (already existing) project would actually be more of a commitment to community.

And finally there is a navigation problem. Combined with there being so many choices. It's the
same problem that often faces software developers confronted with a vast code base. It can
take so long to find your way into it that creating your own fresh solution turns out to be as
quick (over looking as is usual the probability that your code base has many more bugs and
design flaws already overcome in the alternatives.)

Parting is such sweet sorrow - The Optimistic Contributor's review of Parted Magic

okeydoke — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:13:15 +0000

Parted Magic sounds nice but hardly unique. http://gparted-livecd.tuxfamily.org/ (50MB) seems
very similar. http://sysresccd.org/Main_Page (160MB) included gparted and many more useful
recovery tools.

Parting is such sweet sorrow - The Optimistic Contributor's review of Parted Magic

edschofield — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:56:43 +0000

Released on "10/26"? How quaint! But LWN's international readership would find the ISO date
format less confusing.

A pity, but hopefully not in vain!

moxfyre — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:55:34 +0000

It's a pity to hear about such a well-regarded open source project ending.

But hopefully all of the hard work in producing a polished LiveCD won't be in vain.  My
thinking is that Parted Magic may have failed, in part, because there are similar
distributions which do many more tasks, and do these particular ones almost as well.

I'm thinking of SystemRescueCD, which includes all kinds of password utilities, disk wipers,
BIOS inspection tools, network tweaking tools, etc... in addition to a similar set of
Partitioning software.

While SystemRescueCD is highly useful, it isn't perfect... it lacks the kind of polish and
cohesive integration that you describe in Parted Magic.  

Perhaps SystemRescueCD can adopt some of what makes Parted Magic so great, including the
custom patches and slick interface that you described.  That would be a great example of open
source code outliving the original project that created it, and making itself useful to a
wider audience.