Sun, 11 Jun 2006
I got a macbook amature, not a macbook pro but it's fat nonetheless
Apple has entered my life again in the form of a laptop computer. This is my
second Apple laptop in 6 years, my previous being a Pismo Powerbook that got
stolen right around the time when I stopped using OS X and moved to Debian
GNU/Linux. In all honesty, I have not used a proprietary
operating system in those three years for any of my personal work and I made
many decisions in my professional life to do the same. It worked out
extrodinarily well.
Then Apple caught my attention with their moderately priced 6 pound widescreen
laptop with a camera and motion sensor built in. Sweet! It also contains a
Intel Duo CPU. Double sweet! But the thought of
using OS X was painful. A real deal breaker. Then I discovered Parallels, a
virtualization application similar to VMware but designed for the OS X desktop
user. It supports a pirate's booty of other operating systems, including my
favorite Debian GNU/Linux. Triple sweet!
Needless to say the first thing I did when I opened the box and turned on the
Macbook was...watch that stupid animation they put on new laptops. Yeah, that
was annoying...but
after that I downloaded and installed the Parallels
RC2 application and installed Ubuntu Linux. While not Debian, it's familliar
and has all the same packages aside from Gnome and the kernel. And I've been using
that since.
But now I get to the point of this writing. I noticed that the 60 gig hard disk
inside the laptop was already quite full after doing nothing more than
switching on the laptop for the first time. What could be consuming all this
disk space, I asked myself. A virus? Spyware? Some Apple store employee's
mp3 collection? None of these assumptions were correct. MacOS X 10.4.6 was
consuming 15 gigs of my disk space. This is just absoultely insane. What the
hell does an operating system need 15 gigs of disk space for? Here's my
findings, which are far from exhaustive:
- 2.1 gigs of language data. Not fonts, but text strings for menu and
system messages translated into languages other than English. That's actually
pretty cool but why does Apple not provide a removal tool for those who need
only one language?
- 1.95 gigs of music loops for the Garage Band application. This one
freaked me out. What the hell does an unsuspecting user need this for? How difficult would
it be to manufacture a DVD including the samples and put it in the box?
- 1.37 gigs of printer drivers. I'll admit printing on desktop computers sucks
ass. I'll admit it's very confusing and hard to configure a new printer. But
is it 1.37 gigs confusing? I say no. That DVD I mentioned still isn't filled
to capacity yet. Perhaps these can go on there too?
I haven't wasted anymore time hunting for more crap to delete but my system is
now down to a mere 10.3 gigs. about 1 gig of this is consumed by some SDKs from
the Xcode installer (which I actually want because I installed them myself, on
the included CD-ROM I might add) but really, roughly 9 gigs of disk space
consumed for an operating system with ONE other third party application
installed? Barf. And if you actually read this far and found my loophole, I
already subtracted the size of the GNU/Linux virtual machine from all of these
calculations. So there.
posted at: 19:39 | path:
/computer_hardware |
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