QTParted is a graphical frontend to GNU Parted, a Linux-specific disk partitioning utility similar to fdisk. It is programmed in QT, obviously, but is not attached to any desktop environment project. It is listed on freshmeat as imitating Partition Magic, which I have never used.
As for the functionality of QTParted, it can be everything Parted can do, and more. It uses libparted rather than Parted proper, and incorporates some other tools to add support for creating most common filesystems, and for resizing NTFS and ReiserFS partitions. I resize NTFS paritions quite often, as every PC in the house dual-boots with Windows XP.
QTParted has a very slick, helpful interface, as long as you are familiar with disk paritioning in the first place. All disks are shown in a pane at the top left, and below is detailed information about the selected disk. Along the top is a bar that represents the current paritioning scheme of the current drive, and below that is a lising of detailed information for each partition and free section. You can right click on a partition or free space in either place to change it (resize, delete, create a partition, et cetera) or use menu commands. The whole thing is very friendly and neat.
I first encountered QTParted on the Mepis LiveCD, and kept that disk around for quite some time just because it had QTParted on it. I have since moved to the more convenient GNUStep LiveCD, which also has Grub.
I'm still waiting for such a project to be done with bootloading, using GRUB (or Lilo, or maybe both). I would love to have good visual tools to advertise for both paritioning and booting. At present, managing bootloaders is still a pain in the arse.
QTParted is written in C++ and QT, using libparted. It was written by Vanni Bruto, who pulled parts of it from the existing but inactive KParted. It is available from the web site, via apt-get under Debian and probably available from other distributions.
- QTParted: http://qtparted.sourceforge.net
- GNUStep LiveCD: http://linuks.mine.nu
- Parted: http://www.gnu.org/software/parted