making some more hard drive space on my new iBook

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J - 30 Aug 2004 11:01 GMT

Hi,

I just bought a 12" iBook with 30GB hard drive. I notice that out of the
box quite a lot of drive space is already used and I'm wondering what I
can free up without trashing the system in some way?

I'm already managed to remove Garage Band, as I'm not really into it.
that freed up about 2 GB.

I've also removed some documentation that I've found in non-English
languages (e.g. Japanese instruction for iCal etc)

I also found in the Library->Printers folder about 600MB of printer
driver (I gather) under Lexmark, Canon folders etc. As I don't intend to
use a printer at all, i though of moving this to a CD. In case I did
ever need it I could copy it back.

Is there anything else that is taking up a lot of space on a new iBook
that I could remove? As I'm using Entourage, I also thought of removing
iCal, addressBook etc. Would this trash the OS in any way?

thanks for any help,
John

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Mathias Rongved - 30 Aug 2004 13:13 GMT

> Is there anything else that is taking up a lot of space on a new iBook
> that I could remove? As I'm using Entourage, I also thought of removing
> iCal, addressBook etc. Would this trash the OS in any way?

You can remove anything in /Applications/ that you don't use or plan on
using. Otherwise, as I've said before, nothing beats a good old
reinstall with a reformat of the hard drive.

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Mathias Rongved
www.rongved.com

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Pat Janes - 30 Aug 2004 13:35 GMT

> I just bought a 12" iBook with 30GB hard drive. I notice that out of the
> box quite a lot of drive space is already used and I'm wondering what I
[quoted text clipped - 14 lines]
> that I could remove? As I'm using Entourage, I also thought of removing
> iCal, addressBook etc. Would this trash the OS in any way?

I'd leave the applications alone, they don't take up all that much space.

Whenever I set up a new Mac, I do a format and reinstall from the CDs
that ship with the computer. I do a custom install and deselect any
languages I'm not going to use.

The language support files take up a lot of space. Your iBook is factory
configured to work with a lot of different languages, most of which you
will never use. Assuming that you will dump all of the non-english
language files, you will save around a gigabyte of drive space.

There are a couple of freeware utilities that claim to safely delete the
language files from a default install of OSX - Delocalizer, Monolingual
- but I have not used them. If you do try one of these utilities, at the
very least you should have a bootable backup of your system in case
something goes wrong.

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J - 30 Aug 2004 15:07 GMT

>>I just bought a 12" iBook with 30GB hard drive. I notice that out of the
>>box quite a lot of drive space is already used and I'm wondering what I
[quoted text clipped - 31 lines]
> very least you should have a bootable backup of your system in case
> something goes wrong.

Thanks for your help. Where would I look for the language files? Is it
just .lproj files or is there more that I should look for?

John

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Tom Harrington - 30 Aug 2004 17:24 GMT

> Where would I look for the language files? Is it
> just .lproj files or is there more that I should look for?

Those are the language-specific files. There are likely hundreds or
possibly thousands of them...

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Tom "Tom" Harrington
Macaroni, Automated System Maintenance for Mac OS X.
Version 2.0: Delocalize, Repair Permissions, lots more.
See http://www.atomicbird.com/

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Sébastien MARTY - 30 Aug 2004 19:24 GMT

Tom Harrington a écrit :

>>Where would I look for the language files? Is it
>>just .lproj files or is there more that I should look for?
>
> Those are the language-specific files. There are likely hundreds or
> possibly thousands of them...

DeLocalizer (http://www.bombich.com/software/local.html) might help...
(works here with Panther 10.3.5)

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Sebastien MARTY - Palmiste macintoshien et traducteur...
* <http://sebastienmarty.free.fr> : mes traductions publiees
* <http://palmiciel.free.fr> : logiciels PalmOS traduits en francais

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Mike Hall - 30 Aug 2004 19:52 GMT

>> Where would I look for the language files? Is it
>> just .lproj files or is there more that I should look for?

Yes, just 'lproj' files -- but you'll want to keep the ones for _your_ language settings.

>Those are the language-specific files. There are likely hundreds or
>possibly thousands of them...

So right you are, Tom!

This is on 10.2.8...

$ locate lproj | grep 'proj$' | wc -l
11157

(It assumes that your system has been up all night at least once, in order to create the 'locate' database. Or else, you've run the nightly/weekly scripts some other way.)

Sample sizes:
1184 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/ko.lproj
1208 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/no.lproj
1200 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/pt.lproj
1228 /Applications/iCal.app/Contents/Resources/Spanish.lproj

Around 1MB each, for this sample.

Here's how to see what's out there:

    locate lproj | grep 'lproj$' | grep -v English | while read D
    do
        du -ks "$D"
    done

Replace the 'du' with an 'rm -rf "$D"' to get rid of the directories.
(will need a 'sudo'). Be careful!

Welcome to the world of intro sys-admin!

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Mac Forum / General / Portable Macs / August 2004

making some more hard drive space on my new iBook