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The other day, Felipe, a friend of mine, came with a USB stick he found on the street and asked me to format it. He was surprised that I had to dig into man pages and google to find out how to do it and said “Why don’t you just right click in the device icon and choose format”?.
It was a bit embarrassing to tell him that we in GNOME don’t have currently a USB stick formatting tool, so I told him I’d write one in the next days to make things easy.
So, I did it. I wrote garon, a simple tool for formatting USB removable drives, which following the KISS principle, won’t allow you to do any fancy thing with the drive, but just to format it, set the label, and that’s it. Here’s the mandatory screenshot.
It currently uses tools like sfdisk, mkdosfs, and mkfs.ext3 to do the hard work. The existing drives are detected using HAL. The UI needs some polishing and there are still a few things I would like to do with it (like recognizing plugged/unplugged USB sticks), but today, talking with Emmanuele, I discovered there is already an effort to replace gfloppy with such a tool. So now I wonder if it is worth the effort to keep on hacking on it. :-(
Anyway, if there’s anyone interested on this still experimental piece of code, here’s a tarball. Please send me any comments you may have about it. And remember, don’t use it unless you are brave, as it could kill your cat and burn your house!
Thanks to Cristian for lending me a USB stick to play with it.
