Disk usage graphical presentation

I found out by accident about this GNOME tool, the "Disk Usage Analyzer". It has a surprisingly good UI, displaying subdirectories as concentric circular arcs. It makes visually obvious the spots where all the place is wasted. Or spent.

As an illustration, here's a screenshot of it displaying the disk usage taken by a fresh checkout of Perl 5's sources.


I wouldn't have thought that Encode was taking so much space. (This is, of course, due to all the files that describes the various encodings recognized by this module.)

Saving GNOME settings

Here's a small tip I got from GNOME expert Pascal Terjan, and that I'm copying here because I don't trust my memory:

Want to inspect the settings of some GNOME application? Use gconf-editor.

Want to copy the settings of some GNOME app (like, say, metacity) from one desktop to another? Use the command-line tool gconftool, specifically the options --dump and --load. (The paths you need to feed to gconftool can be retrieved via gconf-editor.)