Hi everyone, it’s been a while since I posted anything on here, so I’m making two new posts now: this one on the new DDRescue-GUI, and this one on the massive changes in WxFixBoot. 🙂
You may know that I recently released the fairly uninteresting DDRescue-GUI v1.5.1, which was a maintenance release that did exciting things like fix the time elapsed counter, and… that’s the best bit XD
This time, I have some changes worth mentioning!
The GUI has remained largely unchanged, except there are quite a few behind-the-scenes improvements in this one:
DDRescue-GUI’s Exciting Changes
Support for Fedora!
Since I’m supporting Fedora with WxFixBoot from now on, I thought I’d try DDRescue-GUI on Fedora, and viola, it just worked! Every screenshot in this post was taken on Fedora to celebrate this 🙂
It’s not often when something just works without much fiddling, so that was nice. From now on I’ll be supporting Fedora and derivatives from version 22 onwards.
It uses the new Disk Information getter from WxFixBoot 2.0~pre2!
This is great because it adds support for features like RAID arrays, and LVM disks, so they are now present in the choice boxes and the disk info window (see screenshot below).
It also makes the GUI more reliable and fixes some issues with detecting EFI partitions on some systems, so it’s good for everyone.
Fixes in the Authentication Dialog
I noticed on Fedora, the GUI wouldn’t start, and it turned out to be because DDRescue-GUI froze when trying to print output, so I fixed that by redirecting it to the terminal instead of throwing it away.
This fixes the bug on macOS and Ubuntu where DDRescue-GUI would occasionally not start.
More boringly, I also made the text at the top of the window normal, instead of bold, to avoid a weird overlapping error on Fedora:
The Boring Changes
Okay, these aren’t that boring, but regardless they are still important.
Disk-related fixes
There are a lot of fixes related to this, particularly on Linux systems:
- Display partition numbers greater than 10 correctly when asking the user which partition to mount.
- Get rid of the useless IDE/ATA HDD file filter in the file dialogs.
- Don’t create duplicate entries in the device selection choiceboxes.
- Don’t try to unmount normal files.
- Various miscellaneous fixes for mounting & unmounting output file on OS X and Linux.
Other stuff
The Mac package now bundles ddrescue 1.21, instead of 1.20, which may make a subtle difference in the speed/amount of data pulled off drives, and the bundled python has been updated to 2.7.12.
DDRescue-GUI doesn’t depend on GNU parted any more, and I did some refactoring, general maintenance, stuff like that. This stuff is truly boring, even to me. XD Again, if you’re interested in the details, see the changelog here.
That’s it for this post, but see this one if you want to read more. If you liked or disliked this post, please let me know in the comments so I can make the next one better 🙂
I will be doing a detailed hands-on review of Linux Mint 18 soon, seeing as it’s my daily driver, and from now on, I will post more often; I have a few interesting ideas I’d like to share, and a new project that I’ll start work on soon 🙂
