Comments on: Mac freebies for Christmas

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:24:56 +0000

Yeah some apps can barf. I've saved probably 1.2GB on my Intel MacBook from pruning binaries and only had a couple of apps screw up which was a quick download and reinstall of those packages.

Apple really should provide some sort of mechanism to determine whether they are installed/stripped into the OS.

Oh well, perhaps in 10.6.

[)amien

By: Jane

Jane — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:46:37 +0000

hi again :P

Just wanted to mention that people should be careful using tools like monolingual and xslimmer. you might unintentionally be removing parts of the program that may still be required to run. the latest version checks for code-signed apps and doesn't touch them (oh what a sh*tstorm that would be), thankfully.

the last time i used monolingual to remove architectures it completely hosed half my applications beyond repair, and I ended up reinstalling the whole system and all the apps from scratch. granted, i'm on an intel mac, but so are many, many other people.

if space is that much of an issue, maybe they have other things that need deleted. i haven't heard of any significant gain of space after removing localizations and architectures, unless you happened to have like 200 apps installed. :)

By: Jane

Jane — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:46:40 +0000

@Damon,
All the clients have their individual quirks and bugs yet-to-be-fixed that sometimes cause issues with the trackers involved (and once in a while it's a client-side issue, e.g. with one of the previous builds of Transmission and data corruption). Generally sticking with Az 2.5.0.4 or latest Azureus 3, latest rtorrent stable, or latest Transmission stable minimize the chances you might run into any problems. Pretty much most other Mac clients have issues on their own..Bits on Wheels hasn't been updated in years, there's a bunch based on faulty libraries (e.g. BitRocket), and well..Xtorrent is in a category of its own, being one of the first shareware clients I've come across in years of using BitTorrent.

Personally I use Azureus 2.5.0.4 at home for all the advanced settings I can't get anywhere else, and rtorrent and torrentflux (a webui based on BitTornado) on my server for convenience. Transmission's never been and probably never will be as advanced as Azureus is, and the cli version isn't that fantastic compared to bittornado and rtorrent. Transmission's the only one with a half decent more "native" looking interface, so if that is appealing to you..shrug.

By: Damon Stephenson

Damon Stephenson — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 05:01:35 +0000

Agreed, Transmission is superior by far. BitRocket is banned from quite a few trackers, although Transmission is banned from only a few for some reason. I find it *extremely* stable.

By: Damien Guard

Damien Guard — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 08:51:56 +0000

Yeah I've been having all sorts of pain with BitRocket since I installed it - mainly crashing and restarting.

Will give those others you suggest a try.

[)amien

By: Jane

Jane — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 06:01:25 +0000

BitRocket was a great idea, but alas an unacceptable client on a fair number of trackers. I'd suggest Transmission, then rtorrent and the webui for rtorrent called Clutch, and Azureus. None of them are perfect, but all three by far are updated, have a fair number of features, and generally work everywhere.