[sf-lug] GKsu has long been EOLed

[Rick Moen]

Quoting aaronco36 (aaronco36 at SDF.ORG):

> ((Bit of an aside .....Why would anyone in their right mind wish to
> format such partitions into such whimsical 31GB sizes you might ask?
> Because in sizes _greater than_ 32GB specifically on USB drives,
> Windows 7 would continue to insist that such partitions just
> _wouldn't_ take the mutual-OS-recognizable FAT32 formatting; IIRC,
> NTFS or exFAT were recommended for partition sizes >32GB instead.
> .....))

This is a notorious, deliberate, and _artificial_  limitation of the
partitioning tools in recent MS-Windows releases, where the Windows Disk
Management software has been gimmicked to refuse to create FAT volutes
bigger than 32GB.  Possibly MSFT is trying to subtly encourage NTFS and
exFAT (a secret-sauce variant on FAT developed in 2005 for use on flash
storage), and discourage continued use of FAT32.  So, they made their
partitioning tools act as if FAT32 has a 32GB size limit -- which it
_doesn't have_.

Happily, though, you don't _need_ to use MS-Windows partitioning tools
for that purpose.  If you boot your choice of Linux live distribution on
that machine, you can then use _its_ partitioning tools, which will
happily make FAT32 partitions as big as two terabytes.  MS-Windows has
no problem _using_ those; it just refuses to create them.

As a plus, pretty much any Linux distribution will provide better
facilities for resizing partitions, cloning them, etc.  And you say you
like GParted, so... good news!  You can just skip MS-Windows's
partitioning software entirely and use GParted (like from SystemRescueCD
booted from a flash drive, for example).

(You really shouldn't want to make truly ginormous FAT partitions, because
it's a very limited partition scheme, but it's of course unparalled for
cross-OS compatibility.  Beware of the filesize-limit problem:  FAT32
cannot house any file bigger than 4,294,967,295 bytes, i.e., 4GB.)

By the way, if the reason you're creating FAT32 volumes is for
compatibility between MS-Windows and Linux, ever since Linux's NTFS-3G
driver became production-ready in mid-2006, NTFS has been at least as
good as FAT32 for Windows/Linux file exchange.  OTOH, if your
aspirations include sharing with _other_ OSes such as MacOS X, there's
still nothing as good as FAT32.  (OS X can mount NTFS volumes but only
with write access disabled, i.e., read-only.)