Saving space in OS X and other netbook tips

Update April 3rd 2009: Added the section on removing the hibernate image. Saved me 2 GB.

My place is under renovation right now so I’m spending the next week either on couches or on a matress on the floor. When I’m borrowing room like this I need to conserve space so I took my hackintosh Dell Mini 9, and when I’ve got OS X installed on a 16 GB SSD the space saving constraint applies. With just the default installation I had roughly a gigabyte free, since when formatted to HFS+ the 16 GB disk only has 14.03 GB usable. I managed to get the install of OS X 10.5.6 down to about 8 GB. By the time I threw on my Macheist items and installed vitals like Firefox and VLC I was able to keep my system at 10.85 GB used, 3.18 GB free. Here’s how I did it.

Monolingual

This is best run immediately after you finish installing. Monolingual will remove languages you don’t need and also strip out legacy PowerPC code from Universal binaries. This free tool saved me 520 MB.

I suggest only running it once because it’s hard to keep track of the same options over several runs. You might find that later on you mistakenly delete something that you wanted to keep. In my case I decided that I wanted to keep Chinese and French, just in case I leant the machine to my friends whose mother languages were either of those, and I might accidentally delete those languages down the road if I keep using Monolingual.

Download: Monolingual from sourceforge (freeware).

Deleting the hibernate image and disabling safe sleep

Safe sleep means that when you sleep your machine by closing the lid, it writes the contents of the RAM to disk. In case you lose power it’ll restore the RAM. Unfortunately this takes up a lot of space. My 2GB of RAM means the hibernate image takes up more than ten percent of available space. Also, the hibernate image isn’t read properly when you’ve got OS X installed on the Dell Mini 9.

You can disable it by following this guide from the Hackint0sh forums.

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
sudo rm /private/var/vm/sleepimage

Removing printer drivers

I was poking around with the du -hs command to find out what was using the most space. It turns out that the Library directory was eating up roughly a third of my drive. I decided to investigate.

Most of the space was taken up by the Printers subdirectory. I was surprised to see that the PPD files made up the minority of that. I assume that the directories like hp, Brother, Xerox and the rest contained printer management programs. I didn’t need two gigs of that, much less for printers that I would never use. You can get rid of them by changing to the /Library/Printers directory and deleting the directories of the manufacturer’s you’ll never use with sudo rm -rf. Be careful about selectively deleting what’s inside the PPD directory if anything. I saved about two gigs this way.

Xslimmer

This application isn’t free, but I think it was well worth it. Thirteen dollars may buy me more storage in the form of a USB pendrive than I’m likely to save from this application, but the convenience of not having to carry another USB stick is great and the SSD tends to be faster than cheap USB storage.

Xslimmer works similarly to Monolingual in that it’s also used to remove legacy PowerPC code and unnecessary languages. It adds a few extra features on top of that. Xslimmer keeps a blacklist of items that can’t be modified due to things like copyprotection. You can keep exclusion lists. It keeps a tally of how much space you’ve saved so you can feel good about spending that $12.95. It keeps backups and automatically clears them out. Since most OS X binaries that you download are still Universal it’s worth keeping around.

Download: from Xslimmer.com (shareware, 50 MB cumulative limit, $12.95 to buy and remove limit)

What else should you do to your new hackintosh netbook?

For starters, you’ll want to install Quicksilver. If you don’t already have it be sure to include Growl. Quicksilver is an application that lets you use a hotkey to type up commands to open programs like Safari or Firefox or iTunes, and also use to launch programs. It’s much quicker than fumbling around with the trackpad on a small screen.

Download: from Blacktree (freeware).

Next, search for freeware! Check out versiontracker.com. They’ve got a great big directory of freeware.

After that’s all through you’ll be at the same point of enjoying your netbook as I am. I love my Mini 9 hackintosh.

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