BleachBit 0.3.0 released

Version 0.3.0 is a major release of BleachBit, the file and privacy cleaner for Linux. BleachBit aims to be an easy, advanced, and smart way to clean junk including broken menu entries, cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, and temporary files.

Highlights

This is a major release including these changes:

• Introduce cleaning of localizations: Go way behind localpurge, which only cleans some localizations and just for a few Linux distributions. BleachBit finds more files and works with all Linux distributions. Also, BleachBit is "safer" than localpurge because you must run BleachBit manually, and BleachBit allows you a preview.
  
  Note: Usually you must run as root to clean localizations!
• Create a menu option to launch BleachBit as root on Linux distributions for which installation packages are provided. Administrator privileges are necessary to purge localizations.
• Extend cleaning of recently used documents on Ubuntu 8.10 according to a new file standard.
• Introduce a preferences dialog:
  
  
• Implement secure file shredding to hide file contents (to prevent data remanence) by overwriting files. It is effective in most operations (those which delete files) and on some file systems. The standard file system Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 is ext3 with data=ordered is compatible with shredding, but it is not effective in other situations including JFS, ReiserFS, and XFS. For more information, read the man page for shred.
• Individually describe each operation option to make it clearer what will happen:
• Show the actual size (not apparent size) of sparse files. This follows the default behavior of du instead of ls. Notice files are generally multiples of 4KB: even a 1B file generally occupies 4KB because of the file system allocates multiples of its block size.
• Add new operation to clean clipboard.
• Add Bulgarian translation from Svetoslav Stefanov.
• Delete XChat logs in recent XChat version.
• Fix bug that prevented some Firefox and Epiphany options from being used (i.e., some files were not deleted).
• Fix handling of symlinks.

Smaller changes

The smaller changes include:

• When cleaning history for OpenOffice.org, also delete the cache.
• Improve the text window (on the right) with markup (colors and text styles) and text wrapping.
• Show tooltips on the toolbar.
• Various bug fixes, optimizations, and improvements to the unit tests.
• Enable searching and fix scrolling in the operations tree view.
• Fix thread-related bug on Ubuntu 6.06.

Download

Download BleachBit now. Installation packages are ready for 18 Linux distributions-versions including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu. Ubuntu 9.04 users: install through your native repositories.

Ubuntu and Debian .deb repositories

Thank you Luca Falavigna for packaging BleachBit for the Ubuntu and Debian repositories! I already provided .deb packages for Debian 4 and Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) through 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), but now Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) users can install BleachBit through the Ubuntu repository.

Because BleachBit is new to the repositories, make sure your system is up to date before attempting installation. (If the package app-install-data is not up to date, you won't see Bleachbit in Add/Remove Programs.) Alternatively, you can simply run sudo apt-get install bleachbit.

By the way #1, if you run 6.06 Dapper Drake or another distribution for which there is no package, it's easy to run BleachBit without installation like this:

tar xvjf bleachbit-*.tar.bz2 cd bleachbit-* python bleachbit/GUI.py

By the way #2, a major new release of BleachBit is just around the corner!

BleachBit 0.2.1 released

BleachBit 0.2.1 is released. BleachBit is a file cleaner to free valuable disk space and to maintain privacy.

Highlights of changes

• Clean OpenOffice.org recent documents history (through a new system that performs operations more sophisticated than simply deleting a file)
• Introduce application icon
• Improve internationalization
• Add first localization: Spanish
• Fix conflict in packaging regarding 32-bit and 64-bit hosts
• Show version in about dialog (suggested by obscur156)
• Find RPM build directory a better way
• Improve abbreviation of bytes (for example, show 123,457 bytes as 120.6KB)
• Fix some small bugs

Translators are welcome to improve translations!

Screenshots

Notice the last file is prefixed with an asterisk. This indicates a special operation. In this case, the Common.xcu file is edited to remove the OpenOffice.org recent documents history, but the file is not deleted because it contains other information. (Tip: There are other ways to delete the OpenOffice.org recent documents history.)

Also notice the new application icon in the top-right-hand corner.

BleachBit's first translation is to Spanish! It's a little rough, but translators are welcome! (The spelling of "archivo" is already fixed for the next version.)

Download

Installation packages are available for 16 Linux distributions-versions. Download BleachBit now.