Filed under: Software, Leopard
Snatch back wasted disk space from Leopard's jaws
Blogger Christopher Price recently pointed out that Leopard is greedily eating up about 1 GB of disk space by dumping unnecessary language packs onto your computer's hard drive. Christopher makes two interesting points about this.
First, the language bundles aren't necessary for typing or editing documents in other languages, they're simply there for translating the menus, dialog boxes, etc. of native apps. Second, a custom Leopard install won't help you avoid bundle overload because deselecting these files isn't an option.
To wrench your precious disk space from the greedy jaws of Leopard, Price recommends deleting them with Youpi Optimizer. I ran the program on my Leopard-ized iMac and was amazed to find that it freed up more than 4 GB of space. My partner ran it on his Tigered MacBook Pro and he recovered around 2 GB.
Price says he thinks the bundle bloat is a deliberate attempt by Apple to sell more computers with bigger hard drives. I don't necessarily agree with that but it did get me to wondering: What other unneeded files are lurking in our systems that we can delete without affecting performance? Thoughts? Ideas? Bueller?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Jehan said 11:36AM on 11-07-2007
For what it's worth, I did this in Tiger, and it made Tinderbox run like utter crap. The only way I could get Tinderbox back to normal was to Archive and Install WITH the language packs in the install.
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billy said 11:39AM on 11-07-2007
I don't know of any way to remedy this, but have you noticed that there is only 1 version of Leopard? For both PPC and Intel? That means it is completely Universal Binary. And that means that it is much larger than it needs to be.
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Adam Yellin said 11:39AM on 11-07-2007
The version on the website is over a year old and says it supports up to 10.4, will this work properly on Leopard?
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Jeffro2k said 11:44AM on 11-07-2007
I use monoligual it works great also.
http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
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Grog said 11:45AM on 11-07-2007
What exactly does this do that isn't accomplished by a custom install and unchecking all of the unused languages?
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BarglerFace said 11:52AM on 11-07-2007
DO NOT REMOVE PPC LIBRARY ARCHITECTURES WITH MONOLINGUAL IF YOU RUN ANY PPC APPS.
Apologies for the shoutings, but it's appropriate when people start discussing this without knowing the disaster that awaits.
Basically - you will permanently break Rosetta.
So, uh, don't do if you ever want to run a PPC app again. Unless you're on a PPC machine. I don't know the consequence of removing x86 architectures on a PPC machine.
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artaxerxes said 11:52AM on 11-07-2007
Xslimmer does this, i.e. removes languages, and also trims the fat off universal binaries for PPC or Intel depending on what you have... cheap and useful.
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Marshall said 11:56AM on 11-07-2007
I'm confused as well. Doing an erase and install gave me the option of unselecting languages; did this still install these language packs and just not enable them?
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Lisa Hoover said 11:59AM on 11-07-2007
@ Adam - Yep, worked fine for me on my iMac running Leopard.
@ Grog - See Christopher's article for his comments on a custom install. Also, I wrote this for people who've already upgraded and didn't do a custom install. AFAIK, if you were able to scratch these at install (though apparently some folks are reporting they can't), then there's no need to run this program.
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Patrick said 12:03PM on 11-07-2007
These programs also remove the language bundles from installed third party apps, which don't conform to what languages you installed at OS X Install time.
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MacBookOwner said 12:06PM on 11-07-2007
A deliberate attempt by Apple just to sell bigger hard drives?
I hope that dude is joking, otherwise, remove the tin foil hat. Those "useless" language packs are great for people who actually need them, without having to go thru an additional install/download procedure, and is much more line with Apple's tendency to make things EASIER for people, sometimes at the expense of processor cycles, cost, and yes, hard drive space.
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Mystic said 12:19PM on 11-07-2007
Then what were the language packs that I had the option to not install when I updated to Leopard? Something different from what is in this story?
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Matt Punk said 12:29PM on 11-07-2007
I recently upgraded my macbook's harddrive to 250gb, and after all was said and done i had about 190gb free.
The other day I noticed that it had dropped to 80gb free all of a sudden. A little snooping around and I found a fileshare folder in my user library taking up 90gb of space. I think it's from using the screenshare option when I connected to my iMac through my local network.
Anyone else noticing this ? Anyway to make it stop so i don't have to go back and delete these files?
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brad said 12:29PM on 11-07-2007
Another great option is Macaroni. It periodically removes language modules from all programs, as well as a number of other maintenance tasks. Highly recommended.
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REReader said 12:39PM on 11-07-2007
I use Macaroni, but be careful. If you use Adobe apps, and remove their language files, the programs will run but you won't be able to update or upgrade them--you'll have to reinstall the apps with the language files first. (Adobe, it seems to me, has gotten to the point where they care not at all for their customers.)
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tc60045 said 12:50PM on 11-07-2007
Anyone using CleanApp: how do you use CleanApp to target the OS? I've selected the Applications folder and removed arcane languages from those apps, but I'm leery of pointing it at the /System folder....
If other apps are more adept at this, please advise with recent success reports. THx
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Peter Cook said 12:53PM on 11-07-2007
It actually is an option if you do an Archive and Install. If you just do an easy install over an old version of 10.4 that has all the language packs it has to replace the old outdated language packs
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Alan Quatermain said 12:54PM on 11-07-2007
I'll have to agree with other folks here — you can indeed deselect the language packs during installation, except in on particular situation: when they are already present on the system you are upgrading. As the OS installer doesn't have any capability to remove language packs installed by Tiger/Panther etc., it'll require that you update them. If you don't do so, things could go kinda weird, since you'll have old user interfaces from Tiger hanging around in the (perhaps unlikely) event that someone switches their system language to French or something.
For what it's worth, on Tiger I only installed English, so in Leopard I only installed English and Polish. When I look in /System/Library/CoreServices/Resources, that's all I see.
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David Fischer said 12:57PM on 11-07-2007
I used monolingual on Tiger and restored about 3 GB of drive space. But BE CAREFUL!!! The default options are bad choices. Monolingual makes it all too easy to delete necessary files, like English.
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LD said 12:57PM on 11-07-2007
http://teamoverkill.com/blog/2006/04/10/sweet-jebus-thats-a-lot-of-bloat-os-x/
I saved 7GB of space on my iBook using various techniques. I understand why Apple puts them on there, but at the same time, as a power user I'd rather get rid of stuff I know I don't need. It would be awesome if Apple included a clean method to remove such things.
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