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little a · Apr 25, 2007, 09:41 AM

i'm setting up my parent's Mac Mini and i'm very surprised at how 'heavy' (i.e. how many GB) tiger takes up. not being a Mac person i'm afraid i've goofed this up. assuming a clean reinstall of Tiger, how many GB should be on the hard drive (without any additional applications, documents, etc.)? thanks

alfio

Big Mac · Apr 25, 2007, 09:49 AM

It's large, but a lot of it is in support files for Garage Band, iMovie, iDVD and the like. You can trim it substantially by tossing various things or opting to leave them out of the install.

little a · Apr 25, 2007, 10:16 AM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

It's large, but a lot of it is in support files for Garage Band, iMovie, iDVD and the like. You can trim it substantially by tossing various things or opting to leave them out of the install.

ok so say there's very little chance of them using Garage Band, is there a way to 'thin' the program (say by removing supporting files) or do i have to get rid of the whole thing?

alfio

peeb · Apr 25, 2007, 10:20 AM

monolingual will help you.

mac128k-1984 · Apr 25, 2007, 11:31 AM

Originally Posted by peeb

monolingual will help you.

and hurt you.

I've read enough posts of people wreaking havoc on their systems thanks to that little app.

peeb · Apr 25, 2007, 11:42 AM

Really? I've not had any problems.

TETENAL · Apr 25, 2007, 02:24 PM

The language stripping part of Monolingual seems to be fine, but the architecture stripping is dangerous and and will break your system if you don't know about the bug.

Anyway, you can save several Gigabytes by not installing:

• Garageband and its loops if you don't use this program
• iDVD and its themes if you don't have a DVD burner
• printer drivers expect that of the brand you own and the few MB of Gutenprint drivers just in case
• iWork and Office trials
• language localizations except those you plan to use

I suggest to do a clean (i. e. format) install if it's a brand new machine and then install the system and bundled applications with the stuff from above unchecked if you don't need it. If you know what you are doing, you could also track down this stuff manually and trash it. I personally don't touch the /System folder though, so I have to do it from the Installer.

Ganesha · Apr 25, 2007, 05:00 PM

I have a better question, does it matter? If your parents are only lite computer users even 10 GB free is an enormous amount of space. It may be better to leave the iLife suite in place in case they ever want to use pieces of it.

peeb · Apr 25, 2007, 05:21 PM

Yeah, seems to me for most people this is unnecessary.

little a · Apr 25, 2007, 05:42 PM

i ended up using monolingual and it worked fine, no troubles. i wanted to leave them about 25-30 gigs for my dad's growing digital music collection. thanks for the advice all

alfio

Aron Peterson · Apr 25, 2007, 06:11 PM

I did my first reinstall two days ago since Tiger came out. It's the first time I got rid of all the language packs and drivers. Can't believe they want so much space.

peeb · Apr 25, 2007, 06:15 PM

How did you do the reinstall? I'm thinking about that myself as my drive is close to capacity.

Person Man · Apr 25, 2007, 06:25 PM

Originally Posted by little a

i ended up using monolingual and it worked fine, no troubles. i wanted to leave them about 25-30 gigs for my dad's growing digital music collection. thanks for the advice all

alfio

Better make sure they can run PPC (non universal) apps. Monolingual is famous for breaking Rosetta.

If you can't run a non-universal app, then you need to reinstall the operating system.

Aron Peterson · Apr 25, 2007, 06:26 PM

I backed up my docs and prefs to an external drive and then reinstalled from scratch. I didn't intend to do a reinstall. I had done the back up before installing Linux on a partition of my main drive. A Linux install bug deleted my OS X install so I had to reinstall everything again starting with 10.4.0.

peeb · Apr 25, 2007, 07:07 PM

Did you restore manually, or with migration assistant? Thanks!

Aron Peterson · Apr 25, 2007, 07:13 PM

Originally Posted by peeb

Did you restore manually, or with migration assistant? Thanks!

Manually. I backed up my home folder and then copied it back once I had done all the software updates for OS X, iTunes and iPhoto. I had to reinstall my haxies and apps though and reconfigure my email. I took the hard route so you don't have to copy me. I even lost a few emails with serial numbers in them and had to get in touch with Unsanity to get new codes.