[conspire] NTFS Resizing

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ed Biow (biow at bigfoot.com):

> There was a thread on this forum a coupla-few of months back about
> utilities for resizing NTFS partitions.   Mandrake has just released
> 9.1 RC1, which includes NTFS resizing, apparently from ntfsresize
> utility (http://mlf.linux.rulez.org/mlf/ezaz/ntfsresize.html), part of
> the Linux-NTFS Project: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/.

Hi, Ed!  Yes, thank you for bringing this up.  Yes, Mandrakesoft is the
first distribution publisher to include ntfsresize in its installer.
ntfsresize has been included in Linux-Mandrake's "Cooker" experimental
distribution for quite a while, and has been in 9.1 pre-releases since
Beta 3.  They reportedly have a nice graphical front-end on it.

> I believe this is the same resizer used in Xandros.

Actually, _that_ one is PQDisk, a scriptable version of PowerQuest's
Partition Magic.   Please note that the NTFS resizer is reportedly
included only in the Xandros Desktop OS _Deluxe_ edition, not Standard
Edition.

I try to keep my http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/ntfs document
updated, on these matters, mostly courtesy of occasional e-mails from 
Szabolcs Szakacsits, author of ntfsresize.

> I think I'll probably attend the InstallFest on the 8th of March, if that is 
> still in the offing.   Just out of curiosity, does FreeBSD or its ilk ever 
> get installed at one of these affairs? 

Pretty much at every one of them.  I bring a 4-disk set of 4.7 aka
FreeBSD-stable.  Although I have an August 2001 snapshot of 5.0 aka
FreeBSD-current, it's way out of date, and I really ought to throw it
out, I guess.

FreeBSD is very straight-forward to install.  NetBSD is less so, though
it can be a lifesaver on some of the more exotic non-x86 architectures.
i have NetBSD 1.5.2 disks for a bunch of architectures.  I have a
three-CD set of OpenBSD for i386 as well.  Its installer is, well,
cranky and paranoid, as is fitting.

> I don't think I'm quite ready for FreeBSD, but I'd like to give Redhat
> 8.0 a spin or maybe SuSE 8.0 if it is available.  

We certainly have RH 8.0.  From a certain set of rumblings one hears out
on the Net, 8.1 might actually be out by then -- or not.  SuSE would
certainly be fun, but I'd encourage you to buy a boxed set if you wish
to try it.  We bring to installfests the 7.0 "evaluation" single-CD
version.  SuSE Linux AG's business model entails giving you various
incentives to buy the boxed sets, including more-recent versions of
software and many, many more CD-ROMs.  All of those boxed-set CDs
contain non-redistributable proprietary software.  Therefore, the disks
as a whole may not lawfully be duplicated and redistributed.

On the various editions of SuSE, please see:
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/suse-product-strategy

-- 
Cheers,            There are only 10 types of people in this world -- 
Rick Moen          those who understand binary arithmetic and those who don't.
rick at linuxmafia.com