Snow Leopard and its tricks to save space on ordinary Leopard

So you’ve heard about Apple’s latest endeavor, named ‘Snow leopard’. It is basically what Leopard is today, but will be optimized to run on Intel machines only, and also removed will be some cruft that is never used anyway.

First:

- Whan you install Leopard (or Tiger) it asks you to choose a Language for the OS. I guess it will only set it as a preference, but still copies all language resources to your hard drive. These occupy at least a few hundred megabytes (or more) which can be easily removed by the open source monolingual application.

- I have bought and use xslimmer which can remove all the unneeded language resources and code. What I mean by this? Universal binaries hold code for ppc 32/64 bit and intel 32/64 bit processors - 4 times the code needed to run the app. Also if an app can work in multiple languages, all of them are included in its bundle - even if you never use them. Xslimmer also has a blacklist of applications that would not work if treated with it. The list is not too long though… If you do not want to buy Xslimmer, all it does can easily be done in the shell, using built in OS X commands - but since I have it I never tried to experiment with the same in the shell.

- So far you’ve probably saved a good few gigabytes of space on your hard drive (enough for a few movies or some music). Now, there’s still these nasty .nib bundles / files. These keep the resources that describe how an applications interface looks, and are generated by the freely available interface builder application. They still eat up a lot of space, but if you are willing to open up Terminal.app (the shell), and run the following, you won’t regret it:

 
sudo find /System/  \( -name ‘pbdevelopment.plist’ -or -name ‘classes.nib’ -or -name ‘info.nib’ -or -name ‘designable.nib’ -or -name ‘data.dependency’ -type f \)  -print -exec rm ‘{}’ \;

sudo find /Applications/  \( -name ‘pbdevelopment.plist’ -or -name ‘classes.nib’ -or -name ‘info.nib’ -or -name ‘designable.nib’ -or -name ‘data.dependency’ -type f \)  -print -exec rm ‘{}’ \;

find ~/Applications/  \( -name ‘pbdevelopment.plist’ -or -name ‘classes.nib’ -or -name ‘info.nib’ -or -name ‘designable.nib’ -or -name ‘data.dependency’ -type f \)  -print -exec rm ‘{}’ \;