This week’s episode of the MacBreak Weekly turned me onto a great app called Monolingual. For those of you who don’t know, Monolingual is a small app which allows you to remove language files from your OS X install. In case my description isn’t good enough, here’s how the Monolingual website describes their software:
Monolingual is a program for removing unnecessary language resources from Mac OS X, in order to reclaim several hundred megabytes of disk space. It requires at least Mac OS X 10.3.9 (Panther) and also works on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
I don’t know about you, but I use my computer in only one (human) language — English. And I’m willing to bet that you do too, albeit perhaps not English. So why do you have a bunch of localization files for the Mac OS X operating system filling up your hard drive? Enter Monolingual — a handy utility for reclaiming your space for more useful things… like international mp3 files, email or whatever you like.
The great thing about Monolingual has to do with the fact that it allows you to recapture a couple Gigabytes worth of disk space simply by removing language resources that you aren’t going to use! In my case, I was able to save ~1.9G worth of disk space by removing all language resources other then English and English (United States).
Word of caution: This app does remove files off of your machine so you should use it at your own risk. If I were you, I wouldn’t use the Architectures feature in Monolingual since it will remove files which are necessary to run Rosetta. Here’s a snip taken out Monolingual’s FAQ:
Q. Should I remove the non-Intel architectures on my Intel based Mac?
A. You can use Monolingual to remove non-Intel architectures for your installed applications (even if some of the applications are PowerPC-only; Monolingual is smart enough not to remove PPC forks if those are the only ones in the universal binary). However, you should not strip the System frameworks if you want to use Rosetta. Rosetta needs the PowerPC code for all frameworks used by the emulated application and if it can’t find it, you may see messages such as the following in the console:
/System/Library/Frameworks/Cocoa.framework/Versions/A/Cocoa:
mach-o, but wrong architecture
Default Screen:
Disk Space Before:
Removing Languages:
Monolingual Finished:
Disk Space After:
