Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[rcrsn51]

Partview is the applet that runs when you click the free-space icon in the tray. Partview v2012 shows a bit more information about your partitions and its bar graphs are easier to interpret.

When installed, the original /usr/sbin/partview is renamed to partview-old.

[Monsie]

Hi rcrsn51,

I've been looking at Barry's version of partview, trying some changes so it will give an accurate reading after probepart detects an optical drive...

That said, I've since tried your version, and I note some interesting differences, mainly that you have included a reading for one's savefile (when applicable) and have chosen not to include info regarding the optical drive.

I really like the inclusion of the savefile info; I think this is useful. However, I am wondering if a user is using a multisession DVD hence saving info to the disc, would it not be useful to include this information so that one has an idea of how much room is left on the DVD?

Lastly, I noticed that your version of partview gives a reading for the size of the drive and not necessarily the partition. For instance, it shows the size of my hard drive as being 19 gb which is correct, but it has actually been partitioned to include a swapfile so its usable size is about 18.6 gb.
The question I have then is: Should partview provide a reading for the size of the drive or the size of the partition... or maybe both? I have been mulling this over while looking at Barry's version of partview also.

Monsie

[rcrsn51]

Thank you for testing this.

Partview 2102 gets its information from the "df -h" command. I looked at including optical drives, but the information didn't strike me as being useful. The disc was always listed as being 100% full.

However, I didn't test this with a multisession DVD. If someone can confirm that the df command does show the correct information for these discs, I can include them.

[Monsie]

rcrsn51,

I did some more testing using the df (diskfree) command. I confirmed the reported size of my hard drive as indicated in my first post. Then, I used Gparted in Puppy and shrank the partition by three gigs. I ran df again, and found that the reported size of my hard drive was indeed three gigs smaller. So this answered my question that indeed partview is measuring the partition size and not disk drive capacity. It was just a co-incidence that partview reported my hard drive partition as being the same as its capacity... and this appeared to be due to a rounding error as you suggested.

That said, the accuracy of diskfree would seem to be +/- 500 mb which doesn't seem to be very accurate. Another thing that I notice is that the information it reports does not quite fit.... i.e. available space + used space (does not) = partition size... even when rounding errors are taken into account, so I don't quite know what to make of it here except to say that the algorithm that diskfree uses must be somewhat inaccurate. Notably, however, the reported used space is the same as that reported by partview in Wary Puppy.

Lastly, when I tried df -a command on my debian desktop, I was not able to get a reading for my DVD drive despite having a mounted disk, so maybe my suggestion about including multi-session disks is not workable...

I am including screenshots of my tests using diskfree before and after resizing my hard drive partition for reference.

Monsie

[rcrsn51]

[chrome307]

Thanks for this, works great with Lucid