1. Gnome Format: A GNOME media formatter

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2. !!!Gnome Format is not being actively developed anymore!!!

Please have a look at the Gnome Disk Utility, it is far more feature complete and will be part of Gnome 2.28.

2.1. What is Gnome Format?

Gnome Format is a tool to easily format (erase and initialize) external memory media like USB sticks or SD/MMC flash cards for your PC. It is designed for Linux based operating systems using the GNOME desktop.

2.2. How to install

You need Vala >= 0.5.1 (I think). Because Vala is still developing very fast you may encounter problems compiling with an older just as with the latest version of Vala. I hope, I can make releases in the future, for which you won't need the Vala compiler by putting the generated C sources in the tarball.

• Get the current release and untar it

• ./waf configure --prefix=/usr
• ./waf
• (as root) ./waf install

2.3. Packages

• Archlinux has Gnome Format in it's user repositiory
• Ubuntu 9.04 has packages in universe
• Getdeb.net also has packages for Ubuntu 8.10

• Daniel Campos kindly provided a Debian package: http://mate.linex.org/lenix/dists/lenny/main/binary-i386/gnome-format_0.1.0-1_i386.deb

  • He writes: "Ubuntu users should be able to recreate it from its sources:" (don't ask me how to do that, I'm not a Debian or Ubuntu user )

    • http://mate.linex.org/lenix/dists/lenny/main/source/gnome-format_0.1.0-1.dsc

    • http://mate.linex.org/lenix/dists/lenny/main/source/gnome-format_0.1.0-1.tar.gz

If anybody can provide packages for other distributions, I would be glad to link them here.

2.4. Features

• Easy to use
• Autodetects available media through HAL
• Supports external harddrives, USB sticks, SD/MMC cards and other external media
• Supports FAT16/32 filesystem for compatability with other operating systems and ext2 for Linux-only users

2.5. Planned features

• Port the app to DeviceKit-disks (when they make a release)

• (Obviously) support for partition names (depends on DeviceKit; probably libparted can do this now, any hints?)

• Support LUKS for encryption (depends on DeviceKit)

• Use PolicyKit for authentication/authorization

2.6. How to get the latest version from SVN

• [read only] svn co http://svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-format/trunk

• [read write] svn co svn+ssh://$USER@svn.gnome.org/svn/gnome-format/trunk

2.7. Maintainer

• Michael Kanis
• Felix Kaser

2.8. Contributors

• Lucas Lommer, thanks for the Czech translation
• Daniel Campos, thanks for the Spanish translation and the Debian packages