Monolingual and Snow Leopard Server
A quick post to look at how much space is saved using Monolingual on Snow Leopard Server.
Max OSX comes with a lot of redundant files and content. Monolingual is an open source utility that locates and deletes unused languages, keyboards and obsolete CPU code this improving the amount of space on your computer.
Removing the Unecessary Language Files
Snow Leopard comes with support for more than a hundred languages. And each program comes with it’s own language translation for the help and dialog boxes. For example I’m never going to use the Dzonghka language.
Must Delete English
You must NEVER delete the English language. It’s used by the Operating System when translations don’t exist.
Once you click remove you will be asked to enter your Administrator password and the deletion will process.
Not bad, 654 Megabytes saved.
Removing Keyboard Layouts
Not much point in keeping the keyboard languages that I don’t use.
Ninety Megabytes isn’t bad either
A lot of the software that you install on the Mac has code for older CPUs. It’s not needed and can also be deleted.
Another ninety megabytes. Not as much as I though.
Run Occasionally
When you add new OS or Program Updates, new language and CPU files are added. Therefore, running Monolingual occasionaly is a good idea.
Beware!
I have one program (out of the fifty or so that I use regularly) that needs to be reinstalled after Monolingual is run. From this I conclude that older software that uses the legacy CPU architectures doesn’t handle the removal of languages.
It would be impractical to test this for a reall corporate environment where you are running applications that are critical and therefore would not recommend using Monolingual in a production OS X Server environment. I do use this tool on my lab OS X Server with Snow Leopard and everything appears to run just fine. I will update if there are any problems.
