4. Optmizing the Recovery partition
Now you can continue optmizing your Recovery partition. I recommend to use the standard Apple background pic so that you can differentiate it from your main partition with a custom background picture. I always use these things to optimize a system.
- Remove unneccessary kexts
Removing unneccessary kexts saves space on the harddisks and could speed up booting. Especcially graphics card kexts could be removed. I have an ATI Radeon X1600, so I can remove all Geforce* kexts, all NV* kexts and all ATI kexts except ATINDRV.kext and the ATIRadeonX1000* kexts. It is also possible to remove AppleHWSensor.kext and ALF.kext. But - backup them. For this you can use again the Shared partition. But you can optimize it a bit more. Create with Disk Utility (again this tool) an empty Disk Image with the type 'sparse disk image'. This is a disk image which needs only so much space on disk which is needed. The advantage of using a disk image instead of a folder is that every kext (which are containing much more files) don't use a single entry in the directory, they will only stored in this disk image. Best use a subfolder 'Extensions' because you can backup more system data in there. Tip for creating an portable image: create an sparse image size with the size of 4095 MB. So the image will never reach the 4 GB border, which is the maximum file size for FAT32 (standard for external drives), and you can use the HFS+ filesystem on an FAT32 formatted drive.
- Editing system files
Editing system files directly in the /System/Library or /Library folders can be difficult because of the permisisions. For this you could again use the Shared partition. Copy the file you want to edit (f.e. com.apple.boot.plist) to this partition, now you can edit and save it without problems. Then copy it back to it's original place (you have to authorize) and repair the permissions with Disk Utility (what would we do without this tool). Tips: Backup the original file and use a color for the edited file.
- Optimize applications
I always can recommend the
Xslimmer. It removes the PowerPC part and/or unneccessary languages from the programs and saves a lot of space this way. For exmaple, iChat will shrink from 117 to 17 MB! The program has a blacklist, so programs which are problematic (f.e. Mail, Safari and Adobe products) won't be slimmed. I never had problems with slimmed programs. It also has a function to backup programs, but I won't use it because it's rather slow. If you want to backup programs copy the files to another drive. You can use again the Shared partition, and maybe use a disk image again.
- Applications I can recommend:
These apps I have installed on my Recovery partition:
- AMD Tools: ASU, About this Mac modifier
- AppZapper: Removes applications and additional files. But it's not really neccessary.
- Butler: Great program selector for the menu bar
- ClamXav: Freeware Virus killer. Not very important for the Mac, but it's there.
- DivX: DivX Decoder/Encoder
- Docker: Allows manipulations on the Dock, color, 2D mode and so on. I use it to get the arrows back.
- FastIcns: Very easy to use program to create icons up to 512x512 pixels.
- Firefox: Don't know what's this for a prog ;-)
- Flip4Mac: WMV plugin for Quicktime
- Gutenprint: Freeware printer driver which supports a lot of printers
- iDefrag: Defragmenting program, useful before creating backups
- iTar: a prog which uses UNIX archive types which have a very high efficency
- KeyViewer: Applescript which shows the MacOS keyboard table.
- Leopaque: Changes the menu bar's transparency in %
- Little Snitch: Personal Firewall, great program
- LiteIcon: Freeware version of CandyBar, allows to change system icons. I use it mainly for the folders.
- NFOViwer: Shows the .NFO and .DIZ files which come from so bad web sites ;-)
- Perian: A freeware Quicktime plugin with codecs for nearly every format.
- PrefEdit: Allows editing all preferences files
- RapidoStart: Nice program launcher
- RealPlayer: Needed for the web.
- Renamer4Mac: A program and context menu entry which can easily batch rename files
- The Unarchiver: an extractor for a lot of archive types. I made new icons which look like the system icons.
- Toast Titanium 9: You know this.
- Transmission: Lightweight Bitt*rrent client
- VLC player: Multiformat media player which inbuilt codecs. Plays nearly everything.
- Xbench: Our standard benchmark program.
- XSlimmer: was already described above.
I didn't create links to all these progs, but you can find them all in
www.macupdate.com.
If you now think, wow, with these progs the 16 gig of the partition are all used - wrong. With all optimizations and so on it's only 7,16 GB! A bzip2-compressed backup image needs only 2,59 GB. Not bad, eh?