Hello all! After a long Release Candidate Freeze, I'm happy to announce the USBManager 1.0.0 release. Who was following the 1.0-rc version will notice that there are few visibly changes. A great part of 1.0.0 improvements are "under the hood", making the application more stable and fast.

I the past months few bugs were reported, most were simple and didn't cause any glitch in USBManager, except for bug #423476. #423476.

Downloading and Installing

The USBManager 1.0.0 version can be donwloaded here. To install, unpack it and execute the following line:
sudo ./setup.py install


Usage

USBManager can be called through the Applications Menu, in the System section. Alternatively, you can call it with the line: usbmanager.

Its possible to mount/umount the device clicking int the checkbox. To obtain more info about a certain device, just select it and click in the properties icon, or simply double click the device. In this window you can change the devices label.

The "tray feature" can be used calling USBManager with the following line: usbmanager --tray

The 'system tray' gives you the feature to mount/umount the device with only two clicks. With this feature you're able to call the main USBManager interface very quickly.

A good suggestion is put USBManager to start on the tray with the operational system, so it can monitor all your USB device activity.

Also, USBManager provide a way fast and simple way to format you USB devices. Just select the desired device and click in the format icon (broom).

In order to have more formating options, I suggest you to install the following tools: mlabel, ntfsprogs and e2label.




Improvements

Visibly the USBManager has the following improvements:


Better support for Red Hat based distributions (as Fedora).

This new funcionality was resulted by the work on Bug #423476. As Red Hat based distributions does not use gksudo was created a routine to pre-select the proper command used to "become root". Actually this routine searches for the following functions: gksudo, gksu and beesu. If none of those are supported by you Linux distribution, please report a bug here, inform which graphical front-end for sudo can be used and I'll provide the correction immediately.

New Disk usage window design.

The Disk Usage window now has colored bars, used to highlight the biggest files and folders. Also, a device macro analysis was added, providing and overview of the total number of files, average size of files, total number of folders and average size of folders.

EXT File System formating support.

USBManager 1.0.0 supports formating for the following file systems: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, EXT2, EXT3 e EXT4.

Smart umounting.

The device is automatically umounted before changing the device label.

More notifications.

Some more new notifications were added in 1.0.0. Ex: Umounted device notification.

The most important non-visual improvements are highlighted below:

GOBjects Signals

All objects inside USBManager communicate with signals, reducing the usage of pointers nad bringing more code flexibility.

On demand analysis

The Disk Usage tool was modified to provide file/folder scanning and analysis only when a folder is selected. This modification was made to reduce the Disk Usage Tool startup time and making it more fast and user friendly.

Community translations:

USBManager started using Rosetta, launchpad's translation tool. With this, the USBManager translations can be made trough the Web without the need to install some additional software. The translated strings are sporadicly merged into the USBManager's code.

More translations
Further on Brazilian Portuguese translation were added more 5 languages (thanks for the lanchpad community contributions):

• Dutch
• French
• German
• Russian
• Spanish

Actually, there are unfinished translations for Thai (25% translated), Turkish (84% translated) and Arabic (23% translated).



Fixed Bugs

"Minor bugs" corrections:

• #413438 - Details in the README
• #413995 - Renaming of the .desktop file
• #494026 - "Error" repeatedly spelled as "Erro"

"Average bugs" corrections:

• #414003 - Wrong script end-of-line-encoding

"Critical bugs" corrections:

• #423476 - Umounting fail

Community Thanks:

Despite I'm the only one developing USBManager, I must thank to some people in the community to help me concluding this job. I must thanks for anyone that helped me spreading my app through the Web and everyone that reported some bug or errors in this project.

A special thank to Fabian Affolter for helping me improve this project with suggestions and for packing it to Fedora.

Arabic translations: Nizar Kerkeni
Dutch translations: Donkade and cumulus007
French translations: Guillaume Mazoyer, Nicolas Delvaux, Nizar Kerkeni, Pascal Lemazurier and Sorkin.
German translations: BBO, Fabian Affolter, Fred Seidemann, Georg Engelmann and mogli.
Russian translations: Nikolay Edigaryev, Petron, Sergey Sedov and vsink.
Spanish translations: Demuxer, Monkey, Paco Molinero, guillemsster and kaeltas.
Thai translations: Krit Marukawisutthigul.
Turkish translations: zeugma