2 questions about reinstalling OSX (saving space from languages).

Yes.

Not necessarily. The boxes come when you don't have appropriate fonts installed, I believe. As long as you have the fonts, you should be fine. I only have the Romance languages on my Macbook, but I can still read kanji, hiragana, etc. when passing the odd Japanese text.

 

you could also use monlingual

 

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

 

Those language files that you can choose on install are localizations. Meaning that they are translations and such for menus, system settings, etc. The stuff online, like heatmiser said, is just a different font. You should still be able to see that.

 

can anyone tell me how i go about doing this?
im getitn a new mbp soon

 

WOW! Monolingual is still running on my machine, but it has already reclaimed over 4g of disk space!

We were just talking about this at work today too, and I was like "Ahh, I don't care about a couple hundred megs"... but a few gigs.. Awesome!

 

does this work with leopard? I didn't see it on the page and want to be sure before I download it.

 

I just ran it on Leopard and so far, I haven't had a problem (although only going on about 20 minutes)

 

How long does the language removal take?

 

just used monolingual on my ibook g4 osx 10.3.9
i saved 780 mb

 

saved 3.2gb on my new MBP

 

I freed up ~3GB of space in about 15 minutes on my Penryn MBP. Very, very nice utility there...

 

id be careful using monolingual on an intel mac, there have been problems reported.

if you are going to use it make sure you understand what it is doing.

 

I thought this program had problems with intel macs.

 

I would not recommend monolingual. It can cause a lot of problems. I used it and now I can't open finder! And I have a foreign language on my fonts. I have a big mess here!