news
New Releases of Parted Magic and ExLight
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Parted Magic 2026_03_20 Update
Development of the new Erase program was already well underway when NIST published the SP 800-88r2 update in September 2025. Over the past week, I’ve worked extensively to bring the program into full compliance with the revised standards. These changes are included in pmagic_2026_03_20_5.iso. If you’ve already purchased the 2026_03_20 release, simply log into your account to download the updated image at no additional cost.
Over time, Parted Magic had accumulated a number of programs that most users never touched. This bloat had real consequences — the default boot mode, which loads the entire image into RAM, required 16GB to run reliably and made PXE deployment impractical for many environments. That’s been addressed. Unused and redundant packages have been removed, and the compression scheme has been switched from xz to zstd with optimized caching. The result is dramatic: Parted Magic now boots comfortably in the default mode on machines with just 8GB of RAM, and the time from the GRUB menu to a fully loaded desktop is at least 10x faster.
I’d welcome more feedback on the new tools in this release. VisParted, for example, represents a ground-up effort to combine the best capabilities of GParted, KDE Partition Manager, and Blivet-GUI into a single, unified partition manager — along with features that no existing partition manager offers. It’s one of the most capable tools of its kind available today. Community testing has already proven valuable — one forum member identified Samba mounting issues in the Parted Magic Clonezilla frontend, which have since been addressed. However, the new Erase program has received very little attention so far. If you’re using any of these tools, your feedback directly shapes development. Bug reports, workflow observations, and even confirmation that things are working as expected all help move the project forward.
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ExLight 64bit UEFI, Build 260322, based on Debian “Trixie” (Debian 13.4) with Enlightenment 0.27.1 (stable) as DE, Refracta Snapshot and Calamares Installer
I’ve made a new version of ExLight with the Enlightenment 0.27.1 Desktop environment, Refracta Snapshot (create your own Debian Trixie System) and Calamares 3.3.14-1 Installer Framework.