Charles Stross' Diary (RSS Feed)
01-25-2008, 12:00 PM
(I'm on the road right now, visiting relatives, hence the lack of updates this week.)
And now, a question for the peanut gallery.
Let us suppose that I, or someone I know, is planning on buying a Macbook Air — the expensive, space-limited one with the 64Gb SSD. Their intended use for it is web, email, and running NeoOffice while on the road. The choice of machine is non-negotiable. (This is not an opportunity to plug the Vaio TZ or Lenovo X300; advocacy comments will be binned.)
Now, a 64Gb FLASH SSD does not, in fact, give you 64Gb of free space. It gives you about 62Gb. Then you lose another 2Gb (minimum) as swap space. And then you lose whatever the operating system takes up — 4-6Gb, or, in the case of an OS/X bloated by the addition of crapware such as GarageBand, iDVD, iMovie, and so on, about 12Gb — junk that doesn't contribute to web, email, and running NeoOffice.
How do you go about slimming down an OS/X installation?
I'm not talking about simply binning or de-installing unwanted applications; I'm wondering if there are frameworks, prefpanes, and other system components that can go in the trash can — and if so, how to do it safely? I'm aware of Windows apps that slim down XP or Vista by removing unwanted components; is there anything like that for OS/X? (I've already run across Monolingual (http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/). It's good insofar as the intended user doesn't need the ability to type Arabic, but what else is there out there? Are there any utilities for stripping PPC binaries out of Universal applications that are only ever going to run on an Intel Mac, for example?)
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/01/a_hypothetical_question.html)
And now, a question for the peanut gallery.
Let us suppose that I, or someone I know, is planning on buying a Macbook Air — the expensive, space-limited one with the 64Gb SSD. Their intended use for it is web, email, and running NeoOffice while on the road. The choice of machine is non-negotiable. (This is not an opportunity to plug the Vaio TZ or Lenovo X300; advocacy comments will be binned.)
Now, a 64Gb FLASH SSD does not, in fact, give you 64Gb of free space. It gives you about 62Gb. Then you lose another 2Gb (minimum) as swap space. And then you lose whatever the operating system takes up — 4-6Gb, or, in the case of an OS/X bloated by the addition of crapware such as GarageBand, iDVD, iMovie, and so on, about 12Gb — junk that doesn't contribute to web, email, and running NeoOffice.
How do you go about slimming down an OS/X installation?
I'm not talking about simply binning or de-installing unwanted applications; I'm wondering if there are frameworks, prefpanes, and other system components that can go in the trash can — and if so, how to do it safely? I'm aware of Windows apps that slim down XP or Vista by removing unwanted components; is there anything like that for OS/X? (I've already run across Monolingual (http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/). It's good insofar as the intended user doesn't need the ability to type Arabic, but what else is there out there? Are there any utilities for stripping PPC binaries out of Universal applications that are only ever going to run on an Intel Mac, for example?)
(Original Post) (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/01/a_hypothetical_question.html)