Preferences: location of .Alice Folder

[arkppp]

I work in a highly restricted public school network. Our system is locked down very tightly to prevent student abuse.

When Alice launches, it tries to create a .Alice folder in the same folder that contains the Desktop. We need to set the preferences to a different location. I'm enclosing a quote from our district's system admininstrator.

"I have fixed this student’s account. This one is strange but I found that both Alice and Bluej create a folder in the same directory as the desktop folder. It’s not created in the desktop folder but in the same root directory as the desktop folder. This is likely causing the problem as this area has a strict quota.

The students only have 25KB of space for their desktop area. It is my guess that this is not enough space for this program to place its files there once the folder gets created. I would suggest that if the program can redirect this folder creation to another location that it be implemented for next year."

So my question is: How can we set preferences to have Alice create the .Alice folder in another location? We could use the C:\temp folder or point it to the individual user's H:\My Documents.

Your help will be greatly appeciated as Alice is an excellent programming teaching tool.

Thank you,

Alvin Kroon
Kamiak HS
Mukilteo, WA

[grasshopper]

We are having the exact same problem. Any help so far?

Thanks!:

[DrJim]

Not my thing - so probably won't be a lot of help. :o But, since the first posting is nearly a month old - can at least say it's the most helpful reply so far.

Most of the contents of the .alice folder are in the webGalleryCache directory, which isn't needed unless you are using the web gallery. If you delete this folder, the size of .alice drops to the 15-20K range, which is slightly under your size limit.

This will fail the first time (if it indeed ever works with a 25K limit) the web gallery is accessed, unfortunately. Then the .alice directory jumps immediately to >500K and grows from there as more galley items are accessed. (Before I deleted the webGalleryCache, the size of my .alice directory on this machine was >7M.)

Note: This is an old problem. At least in one other case, no solution was found, see http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=914&highlight=.alice .

[grasshopper]

THanks for the reply. Our problem is not the size limit of the desktop area. It is how we have it locked down so the students don't have access to the C: drive (so they can't get in trouble). ;-)

THansk!