We interviewed BleachBit developer Andrew Ziem.

About BleachBit

BleachBit quickly frees disk space, removes hidden junk, and easily guards your privacy. Erase cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, remove unused localizations, shred logs, and delete temporary files.

Interview

Can you tell little about yourself?

When a young teenager I started programming for fun in Pascal. Before I ever heard of open source or GNU, I published my first open source software in 1996 in C for Windows and OS/2.

Programming is an great hobby: it costs nothing, allows creativity, requires problem solving like for puzzles, and can help other people.

I work in a technical role at a large non-profit organization that loves Microsoft. At home I use Linux, which I’ve used for about 9 years.

I’ve used Fedora since version 1, and before that Mandrake (before it was Mandriva).

How did you start with bleachbit, when did bleachbit get created?

Most of the software I had written was command line interface or web interface. Years ago I had used a GUI application in wxWidgets with C++, but since then, I learned Python.

When BleachBit started, I was interested in learning GTK+ using Python (PyGTK). One advantage of PyGTK is it is standard on all desktop Linux systems, and Python saves the programmer significant effort over older languages such as C++.

I combined the desire to learn PyGTK with a perceived vacuum in the Linux world for a safe, easy-to-use, powerful cleaning tool, so in a short time I released the first version of BleachBit 0.1.0 on December 24, 2008.

How many hours do you work on Bleachbit each day/week?

It varies but lately about one hour a day. Less than half the time is spent coding. Testing, packaging, advertising, managing translations, managing tickets (usually feature requests), and answering questions requires a lot of time.

Whats your main target for bleachbit, Windows or Linux users?

Each platform’s users offers something unique. BleachBit was originally written for Linux. By using PyGTK, BleachBit is better suited for Linux: Linux already has PyGTK, but the PyGTK dependencies add about 6MB to the Windows installer. On Linux, there is less competition from similar software, though some Linux power users are slow to accept BleachBit because they think they can achieve the same results with simple scripts. My challenge: run your script and then see what else BleachBit finds.

Though there is more competition from similar, well-established software on Windows, there are many more Windows users in the world:
even a small slice of a big pie represents many users. Windows users need more open source alternatives to proprietary software to open doors to Linux. Also Windows users are more likely to link to the BleachBit web site (which is appreciated) because many Linux users instead install BleachBit from a repository (using conary, APT, Yum, etc.) without visiting the web site.

BleachBit still lacks a few features and polish for Windows. For example, Windows users expect to see Windows file dialogs, but instead they see the GTK+ file dialogs.

Which dist do you think uses bleachbit most?

In a short time of the first BleachBit release, I quickly learned Ubuntu definitely exceeds all other Linux distributions and Windows
too. Ubuntu’s dominance is especially clear in the download statistics.

What makes Bleachbit so special?

BleachBit is free (as in speech), cross platform, safe, easy, quick, convenient, well translated, actively developed, and includes many advanced features such as free disk space wiping, CleanerML (an XML markup for writing your own cleaners), and vacuuming Firefox and Google Chrome.

Any big feature that’s coming to bleachbit in near future?

I’m planning the second generation of CleanerML and a generic feature to find a whole new category of junk files that no other software
finds. These features will help pave the foundation for BleachBit version 1.0.0.

Also, this week I’ll be releasing the first bonus cleaner package, which provides additional cleaners that were not yet eligible for
inclusion in the main package.

What do you know about Foresight Linux?

I first heard about Foresight Linux when I noticed BleachBit in its repository. I see Foresight uses a unique package manager and
provides fast updates.

Thank you for your time and good luck with BleachBit in the future.

And I wish you well for Foresight Linux.

Best regards, Tomas Forsman

Editor’s Note

Fresh start of Foresight Linux newsletter. It’s time to let the users what’s going on and what’s coming in the near future. Our newsletters were scarce in the past few months but we’re working on it and this will be improved with more regular updates from now on. We hope our users will find our newsletter useful and give a hint on what’s happening inside Foresight.

// Tomas Forsman

Development

Gnome 2.28 is currently inside development repository. Still some minor issues, but relative stable. We can’t promise when it will be in stable repo, but we hope within a week or two.

New applications have been added, such as: Unetbootin, Moovida Media Center, nfoview, Taskcoash and more. Some are still under testing, but will soon be available.

Wiki

Boots (Fedora Remix), has now a own space in Foresight Wiki.

Foresighters

We interviewed Andrew Ziem, Developer and creator of BleachBit application. Whole interview here

You can install it easily with packagekit or though Terminal with this command: sudo conary update bleachbit

Community News

A number of new members have officially joined the Foresight community due to their outstanding contributions to Foresight.
For more information on becoming a Foresight member, see this page on the Foresight Wiki.

Join the Foresight Community

Foresight users and developers are active on a number of different social networking sites.

• Share your musical tastes and favorite artists with other Foresight users in the Foresight group on Last.fm. Banshee, Foresight’s default music manager, has built in support for Last.fm.
• Follow a few Foresight developers every waking moment via Twitter or via identi.ca.
• Share pictures of your Foresight Linux desktop at the Foresight Linux Flickr group.
• Join the Foresight Linux group on Facebook.
• Add Planet Foresight Linux to your bookmarks or favorite feed reader, such as Liferea, to read blog updates from Foresight Developers.
• Join us at internet relay chat (irc). The Foresight Linux channels are hosted by the Freenode IRC network. #foresight

Contribute to the Foresight Linux Newsletter

Have a package or piece of software you want to share in the newsletter? Send it in! We are always looking for more writers or contributors, and building the newsletter is a collaborative process using the Foresight Linux Newsletter wiki. We are also looking for volunteers to interview people in the Foresight and GNOME communities, links to news articles on the web or in print regarding Foresight Linux, and all the other content that makes up the newsletter.

Have thoughts or comments on the newsletter? Email tforsman@foresightlinux.se and your letter may be published in the next issue!

Homepage: http://www.foresightlinux.org

Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. Work on the foresightlinux.org WP website
  2. Roadmap for short term (2.1.2 and 2.2)
  3. Wide repo cleanup
  4. Scheduling sprints
  5. Status for DEV space on the wiki
  6. Foresight artwork licenses
  7. Membership renewal?
• Next weeks agenda

Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. The future of Foresight
  2. Team Leads
  3. Hardware for testing
  4. Packaging contest
  5. Infrastructure updates
• Next weeks agenda

Announcements:

• Web site updated to WordPress 2.8.2 (thanks for the push afranke)
• Release notes for the latest versions of all editions have been posted to the blog and links to them have been added on the corresponding pages (by afranke)

A simple, flexible, application launcher for Gnome. Kupfer is a summoner/launcher in the style of Quıcĸsılⅴεʀ; you do not use it to search your files, you use it to summon the object you are thinking about.

Kupfer can right now summon Applications, Recent Files and Places, your chosen folders and their contents, Bookmarks, Windows and Gnu Screen sessions.

The ‘kupfer’ command launches kupfer, or spawns it if it is already running.

Just push enter, if you want to launch the application you see.

Remember, its very fresh application. So it may not work as you expect, but it’s worth a try.

To install it, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update kupfer=@fl:2-devel

Maybe, just maybe, you need to install a dependency. But I’m a bit unsure about it.

DVD authoring application with also Theora slideshow creation capabilities.

It’s still in heavy development, but you can still find it usefull. So install it from terminal:

sudo conary update mistelix –install-label foresight.rpath.org@fl:-devel

Here are the minutes from the last Foresight Council meeting.

Agenda:

• Announcements
• Proposed members/developers
• Proposed Topics
  1. Membership renewals
  2. Toolchain update
  3. FITS and workflow
  4. Tasks and roles
  5. Reschedule Council meetings
  6. Set up ISO mirrors
  7. Empathy vs Pidgin
  8. Infrastructure overview
• Next weeks agenda

Site: http://icculus.org/pyddr/index.php

Pydance is fun dancing game for experience asian dance beat! Showing friends your hot move with big score!

Highly configurable, colorful animated arrow motion, limitless numbers of dance steps, 1 or 2 players, professionally written music, laughter provoking sound effects, and yes, even graphical transitions.

It depends on pydance-music, so the installation from terminal will be slightly different. Open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update {pydance,pydance-music}=@fl:2-devel

Homepage: http://kdekorte.googlepages.com/gecko-mediaplayer

Gecko Media Player is a browser plugin that uses GNOME MPlayer to play media in a browser. It should work with all browsers on Unix-ish systems(Linux, BSD, Solaris) and use the NS4 API (Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, etc.).

To test it out, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update gecko-mediaplayer=@fl:2-devel

Maybe you need to uninstall current browser plugin for your browser, or change in settings in your browser to use Gecko Media Player.

All comments about how/if it works are welcome.

KeePassX is an application for people with extremly high demands on secure personal data management.

KeePassX saves many different information e.g. user names, passwords, urls, attachments and comments in one single database. For a better management user-defined titles and icons can be specified for each single entry. Furthermore the entries are sorted in groups, which are customizable as well. The integrated search function allows to search in a single group or the complete database.
KeePassX offers a little utility for secure password generation. The password generator is very customizable, fast and easy to use. Especially someone who generates passwords frequently will appreciate this feature.

It may come in handy for some users. To try it out, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary keepassx=@fl:2-devel

As soon we know it’s stable enough in Foresight, we will push it to all repositories.