A graphical disk formatter for GNOME
January 11, 2009 by Clair Ching
Filed under Geeky Fun
If you’re not used to the command line and you have to do some formatting, it could be intimidating. Fortunately, there is now a graphical tool that would help you with this dilemma. GNOME Format should do wonders for you! It reminds me of the Windows tool for formatting because of its graphical nature. With just a few clicks, you could now format your USB drive when you need to. Great huh?
However, this tool is not yet part of the current distros. You’d have to download GNOME Format here. One of its requirements is valac, so you might want to download that package first.
They warn us though that this tool might be buggy and there isn’t support for floppy disks yet. Awww. Too bad for those of you who are curious about formatting your old floppy disks. Stick with using your USB drives or SD/MM cards for now. Also, formatting is only for FAT16/32 and ext2. Don’t expect it to be a totally complete tool for now.
What about gparted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/), which already handles fat*, ext2/3, reiser, hfs, etc., etc., etc., and is a part of most Linux distributions?
Eep. I should’ve made a better title. I think that this particular project might be less intimidating to new users so I posted about it. Gparted is great. I use that too but maybe Gnome’s tool for formatting might be a good way to let new users format their disks without feeling overwhelmed.
In regards to formatting floppies, ubuntu has always had a graphical tool by default. Go to edit menu -> System Tools -> check Floppy Formatter.
=)