Ferriteweazle 1.4.0

[hobbo91]

Ferriteweazle 1.4.0 adds Analyse, a view of each side of the disk as Greaseweazle Tools sees it, sector by sector or as flux, as well as Image analysis for image files.

New

• Analyse, draws each side of the disk with every sector as gw sees it.
  • Sectors colours each sector by how it decoded: good, empty, deleted, bad data, bad header or incomplete.
  • Flux shades each track by the flux gw read along it.
  • Fit the window, or drawn to scale for 3½", 5¼" or 8" disks.
  • Hover over a sector for its ID, its checks and, for IBM formats, how each revolution read it. Flux also shows where it lies and the track's flux. Click a sector to open it.
  • The sector window shows a sector's bytes and steps to the next sector, cylinder or side, with its arrows, the arrow keys or a typed cylinder.
• Image analysis shows how an image file is laid out, sector by sector, on Read, Write and Convert.
• PCB Green, a new dark theme (I think that's enough themes for now).
• Tracks turn green as gw verifies them, now also for IPF, EDSK, IMD, TD0, D88, NFD and MSA images written without a format.
• In the Log and a sector's bytes, a selection scrolls when dragged past the edge, and Copy includes lines out of view.

Fixed

• Linux: the bundled Greaseweazle Tools work on systems with glibc 2.42 or later, such as Ubuntu 26.04, where every command failed with (22, 'Invalid argument') (Linux - (22, 'invalid argument') #8).
• Choices no longer shift by a point on hover or press (Pixel shift on radio buttons and checkboxes #6).
• Text reads more clearly in every theme
• Various improvements to tooltips / wording
• Linux: the app no longer closes on start on X11 desktops without libxkbcommon-x11, which is now bundled.

Notes

• The disk view shows only what gw reports. Tracks read with --reverse or --fake-index aren't drawn.
• The gw.exe from gw’s own Windows download runs gw’s commands, but not Detect, Read passes, Analyse or Image analysis. The bundled gw and any pip, pipx or uv install support everything.
• Updating the zip or tarball from the app now replaces every file in the download. 1.3.3's updater only replaced the program and greaseweazle/, so after updating from 1.3.3 that way, unpack the 1.4.0 download over it once (on Linux this adds lib/).
• The AppImages are signed with key 345C DF2C 9C98 5A78 A95A C488 641B 6610 CD25 223A and can update themselves with AppImageUpdate.
• On Linux the desktop entry is now io.github.hobbo91.ferriteweazle. If you made one from the tarball's README before 1.4.0, remove the old one (rm -f ~/.local/share/applications/ferriteweazle.desktop) and run the README's step again.

Ferriteweazle is made for a small community, so word of mouth makes a real difference: if it’s useful to you, please share it with others who use a Greaseweazle. If you’d like to see it listed in the official Greaseweazle’s docs, there’s a discussion here, where a comment on how you use it helps more than a thumbs-up.

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This discussion was created from the release Ferriteweazle 1.4.0.

[GeoKM]

Fantastic piece of work Lee. We must have been thinking the same thing at the same time!
Ive been working on similar ideas for a few months now in https://github.com/GeoKM/fluxctl

Well done. I'm working with flux imagine a few thousand 8" Floppies for the Australian Computer Museum Society. 8-)