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This article is part 5 of an ongoing series of articles on this site comparing Apple Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" to Red Hat Linux Fedora Core 4 (FC4). (The previous article is here.) The point of this comparison is not to say that one OS or the other is "better" but rather to point out the differences and indicate where an artist who previously used Mac OS X 10.4 would find Linux to be easier, harder, or the same to use as the Mac. See the introduction article for more information and links to the other articles in the series. Although the focus of this series is on the needs of designers, artists, and content creators, the content should be relevant to any number of Mac users or Linux users.
In general, there are a lot of things that a computer user needs to do with the disk volumes attached to (or part of) their computer system. For new drives, it is necessary to partition and format them. For existing drives, removing partitions, erasing them, re-sizing them, checking them for errors, and backing them up are all concerns. For a drive experiencing problems, file recovery and error correction are the main issues. For CDs and DVDs, burning data to recordable media is an issue.
To greater or lesser degrees, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X come bundled with tools that address some or all of the above issues. To compare Linux and OS X's bundled disk tools, we'll first build a list of capabilities a user might need, then compare what the two operating systems offer in terms of tools to address those needs.
Ideally, we'd like our operating system to include tools to do the following:
- Partition a drive
- Remove a partition
- Re-size an existing partition without data loss
- Erase a volume
- Check a volume for permissions problems
- Check a volume for structure errors
- Check a volume for bad media
- Defragment a volume
- Format a volume
- Backup a volume
- Recover lost or deleted files
- Perform sector editing on the disk
- Burn data to recordable CD
- Burn data to recordable DVD
- Create a disk image file
- Set up a software RAID array
- Enable/disable journaling on a volume
- Mount and unmount drives
Now that we've defined a set of capabilities we'd like to find, let's look at what Linux and OS X are offering us.
OS X's Disk Tools
Nearly all of OS X's disk tools are accessed from one place, the Disk Utility application.
From within this GUI application, it's possible to:
- Partition a drive
- Remove a partition
- Erase a volume
- Check a volume for permissions problems
- Check a volume for structure errors
- Check a volume for bad media
- Format a volume
- Burn data to recordable CD
- Burn data to recordable DVD
- Create a disk image file
- Set up a software RAID array
- Enable/disable journaling on a volume
- Mount and unmount drives
This leaves us looking for tools to do the following:
- Re-size an existing partition without data loss
- Defragment a volume
- Backup a volume (Disk Tools can do this to a degree with disk imaging, but that's not a true backup-type functionality.)
- Recover lost or deleted files
- Perform sector editing on the disk
Disk Utility could be used to create an image file of a disk which could be used as a backup of the original, so it does contain primitive backup capabilities. At the command line, the rsync utility will backup files to another location very efficiently, but the built-in version doesn't support HFS+ resource forks (which are unique to Macintosh files but essential for many of them to function). There may be other command line tools built-in to handle the above functions, but there are no GUI tools other than Disk Utility.
We can give Apple a 13 out of 17 (76.5%) here for GUI-based tools to perform the volume manipulations on our wish list. Now, let's have a look at Red Hat FC4.
Red Hat FC4's GUI Disk Tools
One of the more functional disk tools included in Red Hat FC4 is "KDiskFree", which is a GUI tool that allows you to do the following:
There's also a "Disk Management" tool that allows you to do the following from a GUI:
- Mount or unmount a volume
- Format a volume
And there's a CD/DVD Creator that appears when a blank disk is inserted. It can be used to do the following:
- Burn data to recordable CD
- Burn data to recordable DVD
- Backup a volume
And unless I missed something, there doesn't appear to be a GUI tool there for doing any of the other functions on the list. Red Hat FC4 gets a mere 6 out of 17 (35.3%) based on our list. This makes Linux seriously deficient in the area of GUI based disk management tools. Since we're talking about moving Mac users to Linux in this series of articles, that is a significant deficiency. Most "traditional" Mac user aren't comfortable with, happy about using, or fond of the command line. They expect the vast majority (if not all) of their OS functionality to be available through a GUI. The command line stuff is great for the power users (like me) who like to "script it and forget it" but the mainstream user wants those GUI tools. To successfully draw OS X users into the Linux fold, this deficiency will need to be overcome.
Expanding to the Command Line
From the command line, an OS X user can access virtually all of the functionality of Apple's Disk tool. In addition, OS X includes rsync, ditto, and some other tools that would be useful for backup of files and drives.
Linux, on the other hand, offers a wealth of functionality from the command line. Since I'm not a Linux guru by any means, I'm likely to miss something in the list of functionality below, but since (as I mention above) we're more focused on GUI tools at this point than command line functionality, that's of lesser importance.
- fdisk:
- mount/umount:
- mkfs:
- tune2fs
- Disk Druid: During setup
- fsck:
- parted:
- sfdisk:
- badblocks:
- debugfs:
- mdadm:
- cdrecord:
- rsync:
These tools work together to provide the following functionality:
- Partition a drive
- Remove a partition
- Re-size an existing partition without data loss
- Erase a volume
- Check a volume for structure errors
- Format a volume
- Backup a volume
- Create a disk image file
- Enable/disable journaling on a volume
- Mount and unmount drives
- Check a volume for bad media
- Set up a software RAID array
- Recover lost or deleted files
- Burn data to recordable CD
- Burn data to recordable DVD
But again, unless I missed it, they don't include the following capabilities:
- Check a volume for permissions problems
- Defragment a volume
- Perform sector editing on the disk
For a variety of reasons we won't cover here, fragmentation is rarely an issue on Linux filesystems. There are tools which can defragment Linux files, but these are generally not bundled with the major distros as far as I know.
With the command line considered, Linux handles 14 of our 17 wish list items. By design, it does away with the need for one of them, thus effectively handling a 15th item automatically. If we consider the command line (which is not a good assumption for reasons noted earlier), Linux actually outscores Mac OS X, getting 15/17 (88.2%). This means that the right set of graphical disk management tools could quickly put Linux in the lead here.Arguably, it's a small step to install a sector editor like LDE on top of Linux, getting to 16/17 items (94.1%), but as far as I know there is no built-in mechanism or tool for repairing UNIX file permissions in Linux the way Mac OS X's Disk Utility does it. The Verdict: Linux Disk Management isn't Ready for Mac GUI-Oriented Users
While it certainly seems that Linux has a more complete suite of disk management functions, OS X has it beat in terms of making those functions easily accessible. A user can perform virtually all OS X disk management functions from within a single GUI tool, resorting to a command line only when necessary. By comparison, Linux users have far fewer disk management tools available in the GUI but a much richer suite available from the command line than Apple offers in OS X. Advanced OS X users who are comfortable with the command line would find Linux a better environment for disk management (or at least a more-functional one).
In the next installment, we'll look at activity and process monitoring capabilities.
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