.fonts, .thumbnails, and moving Firefox cache

[cagliostro]

Some ideas to conserve space in pup_save.2fs:

Just tried out Puppy 2.17 and installed WhoDo's EZpup-2.1.7R2.pet. Great job! Desktop looks fantastic, and love the icewm themes.

Examined some of the icons in their folders, and within five minutes found that the /root/.thumbnails folder had grown over 40 Mb, reducing space in pup_save.2fs.

I have a frugal install, so created a directory "junk-cache" on the hard disk partition, and within this folder created another folder called "thumbnails". Used ROX middle button to drag this to /root, and clicked on "create sym link". Deleted old ".thumbnails" and renamed the new link as ".thumbnails". Tested it, and now all thumbnails go to the hard disk /mnt/home/junk-cache/thumbnails, and pup_save.2fs space doesn't drop at all.

Then I installed Firefox 2.0.0.6 by extracting the tar.gz to /root. Now right-click the Internet desktop icon, open as text, and change the command to: exec /root/firefox/firefox "$@"

Started Firefox and in address bar typed "about:config". Right click on the lower window and click on "new". Now when prompted type in "browser.cache.disk.parent_directory". Next choose string type. For the next entry type in "/mnt/home/junk-cache". The full entry in about:config will now look like this:

browser.cache.disk.parent_directory ... /mnt/home/junk-cache

Firefox will create a cache folder within /mnt/home/junk-cache (so it now contains "cache" and "thumbnails"). Firefox will use this for the cache, instead of writing into pup_save.2fs.

When you install extra fonts, it is easiest to put them in the /root/.fonts folder. Here they will be found and used by Firefox, Abiword, or OpenOffice. I put all of my fonts in a folder on the hard disk, and created a sym link for /root/.fonts. I have about 180 font files, and this keeps them out of pup_save.2fs. DejaVu Sans works great in Firefox, but instead of Nimbus No9 you may want to try Gentium for the serif font.

Note: in EZpup when I clicked on the desktop icon "Disk Free" the pop-up was at the bottom of the screen, under the panel. So I right-clicked on the icon, opened as text, and changed the next to last line to "+248-248". [Originally it was "+90-35", or something like that.] These new figures move the pop-up toward the middle of the screen.

EDIT; about:config (not about.config)

[Eyes-Only]

Thanks VERY MUCH for sharing these ideas with us cagliostro! All are excellent ideas, and while I hadn't given thought to the "thumbnails" one myself (so I'll have to use that one!) I have done the one with all my browser caches (SeaMonkey, Firefox, Opera, etc.), and since I use both SeaMail and Thunderbird for my email, all of my email is kept centrally located for all my Linux installs onto one partition. This way it makes no difference what distro I'm in I can access my email all around.

The same can be done for icon themes, saved/backup directories, wallpaper directories, etc., and in this way the pup_save file can be kept to its smallest size possible.

Thanks for your pointers cagliostro!

Amicalement,

Eyes-Only
"L'Peau-Rouge"