Bookmarks can't be saved in Firefox 3

Thank you to Rob from Holland who (not only donated to BleachBit but) reported this bug. When deleting the Places database in Firefox version 3 using BleachBit 0.4.2, it's not possible to save new bookmarks. The bookmarks disappear when Firefox is restarted.

A Mozilla knowledge base article gives the solution. If you suffer this bug in BleachBit 0.4.2, close Firefox and run this command:

rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/bookmarkbackups/*json

The explanation: Firefox tries to reconstruct the missing places.sqlite file from the JSON backups.

The fix is applied for BleachBit 0.5.0. For older versions, you may apply this patch [link broken].

BleachBit on Windows Vista

With a change to replace threading with use of PyGTK's idle event loop, BleachBit starts on Microsoft Windows.

BleachBit doesn't do anything useful yet on Windows because the file paths it currently knows are specific to Linux: that's easy to fix. The part I am not looking forward to is trying to bundle GTK+, Python, PyGTK, PyCairo, and PyGObject into a simple installer, and then I have convince users to download 24MB of runtime to run a 100KB program. Today's modern system have plenty of bandwidth and disk space, but still that's ironic situation for a system cleaner.

Previous post: BleachBit on Windows (February 2009).

Update: BleachBit 0.5.0 released with support for Microsoft Windows.

The new thread-free code also paves the way to implement a command-line interface (CLI) one day.

BleachBit 0.4.2 released

Version 0.4.2 is a maintenance release of BleachBit, the file and privacy cleaner for Linux. BleachBit aims to be an easy, advanced, and smart way to clean junk including cache, cookies, Internet history, localizations, logs, and temporary files.

Changes

The following changes are included since 0.4.1:

• Clean Adobe Reader 9.0's cache (in addition to previous versions of Reader).
• Whitelist paths in /var/log/ to prevent deleting important files on Slackware.
• Add Danish translation.
• Update French, German, and Finnish translations.

All reported bugs are fixed. BleachBit packages for Slackware can now be downloaded from SlackBuilds.org.

Download

Download BleachBit now. Installation packages are ready for 18 Linux distributions-versions including CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.