Monolingual, OSX Leopard and Snow Leopard — Saving Space

I use Monolingual to save space on the MAC OSX. Quick word on how much space you can save and how to do it.

Monolingual & Snow Leopard

At time of writ­ing, Monolingual has been updated to Version 1.4.1 and I took the step to run it on my Snow Leopard. Even after my cat can­celled the Removal, I think it saved more than a giga­byte of space. As you can see below, the screen shows 320M and the pro­gram had been run­ning for longer.

and remov­ing unwanted archi­tec­tures got me another 299M.

Edit: I got a new MacBook recently and ran MonoLingual after a a full install and I saved 2.3Gigabytes of space.

So I will be con­tinu­ing to use Monolingual to keep my Mac as lean as pos­sible. All the con­fig­ur­a­tion and setup remains identical and the ori­ginal art­icle con­tin­ues below.

Using Monolingual

The first time I used Monolingual on Leopard I got more than 3GB back. I ran Monolingual yes­ter­day and got 500 MB back after it deleted all the lan­guage files from vari­ous pro­grams that had been updated or installed in recent weeks.

Today, I installed the 10.5.3 update (420 MB), then rang Monolingual to remove all the Language packs and got 240MB. Removing the PowerPC Architectures got me another 20MB for a total sav­ing of 260MB.

If you haven’t used Monolingual, it is freely avail­able http://​mono​lin​gual​.source​forge​.net/. Think care­fully before remov­ing archi­tec­tures — if you have ANY leg­acy soft­ware, it can break your com­puter. Removing lan­guages is very simple, low risk and you get a lot of space back.

Slimming down the languages

OS X, and every pro­gram con­tains lan­guage files for every lan­guage that is sup­por­ted — typ­ic­ally more than one hun­dred lan­guages. This is a lot of redund­ant information.

Here is how lan­guages screen looks, I keep the US English as some people have indic­ated that cer­tain developers don’t hon­our the API’s and can break their applic­a­tions if US English is not there. Everything else can be safely deleted. You MUST keep English (or you will be restor­ing from a backup).

Input Menu

The Input Menu doesn’t save much space (less a megabyte):

Architectures

The Architectures doesn’t save a lot of space so many people don’t touch this — if you are risk averse then just skip this sec­tion. I am short on disk space, so get­ting 500MB back is worth it. As I under­stand it, this goes through all the pro­grams on your drive and removes any of the code that makes it com­pat­ible with PowerPC sys­tems (or some­thing like that).

WARNING:

1) Have a backup before you do this.

2) Know how to restore OS X BEFORE you start.

3) Make sure you are run­ning an Intel based Mac (because that is what these instruc­tions are about).

4) Did you double check you are run­ning an Intel Based MAC check here to see what you should see.

This is how my pref­er­ences screen looks. The latest ver­sions of Monolingual are cor­rectly con­figured to stop prob­lems that happened in earlier versions.

Final Thoughts

Every time a pro­gram down­loads an update, the lan­guage files are rein­stalled. OS X updates also add the lan­guage files back (in some parts at least). So you should run Monolingual on reg­u­lar basis, say every month or so.

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