BleachBit 0.5.1 released

Version 0.5.1 is a maintenance release of BleachBit, the free and open source file and privacy cleaner for Linux and Windows. BleachBit aims to be an easy, advanced, and smart way to clean junk including cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, and temporary files. BleachBit is better than freeware: it's open source.

This release is considered stable for Linux and a preview release for Windows. All users are encouraged to upgrade to this release.

UPDATE

June 22, 2009: BleachBit 0.5.2 has been released.

Changes

The following changes are included since 0.5.0:

• Add menu option to securely delete any file. Just click File - Shred files and then choose any files you want to permanently delete. The file contents will be overwritten ("shredded") to prevent file recovery.
  
• Shred files on Windows. On Linux, support file shredding without the external program shred.
• Add warning when selecting option to clear Firefox's Places database, which includes bookmarks. (Firefox's design is to include bookmarks and URL history in a single file.) Many people want "URL history" instead of "Places."
• Clean more Google Chrome and Skype files.
• Clean Google Chrome on Linux.
• Clean gFTP thanks to juancarlospaco.
• Clean Opera, RealPlayer, and X-Chat on Windows.
• Clean Java on Windows 7 (and probably Vista too).
• Use less hard coded paths on Windows for BleachBit configuration, cleaner definitions, and in the cleaners themselves. Now BleachBit should be easy to run on a portable drive (USB drive), though this feature has not yet been tested.
• White-list certain files in /tmp/: TrueCrypt containers, the VirtualBox lock file, the WINE server lock file, two special KDE files, and a special PulseAudio file.
• Request administrator privileges to install on Windows Vista.
• Fix cleaning of Hippo OpenSim Viewer and Second Life on Windows.
• On Windows, update the included GTK+ runtime from 2.12.9 (a year old) to 2.16.1.
• Shrink the Windows installer by 20%.
• On Windows Vista and 7 prevent listing some (maybe all) files twice in the preview.
• Fix display bug related to XML parsing when there is no description element directly under the cleaner element.
• Update Brazilian Portuguese thanks to Alex B. Oliveira and Yann S. Melo.
  Want to help translate?
• Update Czech thanks to Roman Horník.
• Update Serbian thanks to turncoat.
• Update German thanks to Lunix.

Known issues

• Internet Explorer index.dat files cannot be cleaned because they are in use (locked) by a running process. You will see a red error. (Other cleaner programs queue the Internet Explorer index.dat files for deletion during the user login process before Internet Explorer starts.)
• On Windows when there is an exception (such as when a file can't be deleted), py2exe throws up an error dialog about a log file when exiting BleachBit.

Download

Download BleachBit now. Installation packages are ready for 18 platforms including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and Windows.