Can I get rid of Classic from within OS 10.3?

[Enforcer]

So, with World of Warcraft, over 8gb of AAC music files, and a bunch of other stuff I actually use on my iBook's 30gb hard drive I'm getting to be a little cramped for space.

So, I'm snooping around my hard drive and notice that the Classic OS apps and system folder take up a little more than 300mb, which I could gladly use.

Now, my favorite anecdote from my "Switcher" experience is that I had to ask a friend how to uninstall programs (deleting them is a big no-no in Windows World), but I'm far more leary of getting rid of my Mac's Classic support. So, I have two questions for all you more experienced Mac people:

1) Should I get rid of my Classic stuff? I've never used it so far, but is there any reason I should keep around just because?

2) If there's no reason to keep Classic, how do I do this safely?

Here are my specs in case they matter:
12" 1.2ghz G4 iBook
512mb RAM
32mb video
30gb hard drive
Airport antenna installed, bluetooth via USB thingy

 

[Rackhir]

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050430120117382

When I updated to 10.4, I realized I hadn't used Classic for a very long time. I wanted to remove it, and prevent the Classic System Preferences pane from appearing. Lots of hints describe messing with the system parts to do this, but it felt pretty untidy to me, so here's what I did.

You can't simply trash the System Folder that is used for OS 9, as a booted OS X won't let you -- it says it's in use. I rebooted in single user mode (hold Command-S at startup), mounted the drive writable and removed it that way. Once at the singleuser prompt, do
$ mount -uw /
$ cd /
$ rm -rf 'System Folder'
Be very careful with your spaces and escapes, or it's bye-bye to the /System folder (the actual OS X folder!), which would be very bad.

That's the system taken care of.

Now you can reboot and remove /Applications (Mac OS 9) from your disk -- the Finder lets you do this just fine. Now to fix things up so that the Preferences pane doesn't appear, and the system doesn't think there's an OS 9 bootable part of the disk. In the Terminal, do:
$ sudo bless -folder /System/Library/CoreServices
Thiss will re-bless the OS X folder, and remove any blessing from the now-removed OS 9 folder. You will also need to find the com.apple.Classic.some_number.plist file in ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/, and remove it:
$ rm ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.Classic.some_number.plist
If there is a file at ~/Library/Preferences/ called com.apple.Classic.plist, remove that, too. Additionally, there may be a folder at ~/Library/Classic containing a file called .LoadClassicPref. That should be deleted, too, after checking that there's nothing in the folder you want to keep:
$ rm -rf ~/Library/Classic
You may wish to repeat the above preference removals for all users.

That's it. No removing OS X components or otherwise messing with /Library or /System, and the Classic Preferences pane will know not to appear. All you are doing is removing the preference files left over from when you had OS 9 installed, so that the Classic prefpane re-looks at the system, and doesn't bother loading.

 

[Enforcer]

Thanks!

 

[Rackhir]

Thanks!

Anything for someone who's seen the light. Just remember to back up any important data before trying something like this. There are after all only two types of computer users. Those who've lost data and those who are going to.

 

[Enforcer]

Well, I've already done it, but I use Backup to store my stuff on my iPod, so it would've been fine if things had gone horribly wrong.

 

[Dimwhit]

So is anyone still using Classic? I don't think I've used it once in the last three years.

 

[Aeolius]

So is anyone still using Classic? I don't think I've used it once in the last three years.

OS 9 is dead, dude.

So, anyone else with a webcam running Tiger? I want to see what this 4-way vieoconferencing via iChat is all about.

 

[Dimwhit]

I'd be up for it on Tuesday. I have it at home, but no webcam. But I'm putting Tiger on at work tomorrow and I have and iSight, so I'd love to try it out. Maybe toward the end of the day tomorrow, but Tuesday would be a better bet.

 

[Eridanis]

Yes to iSight; no to Tiger. We got our copies in last week to IT, but since I do new hire training with my Powerbook, and we're not rolling Tiger our until the summer, it would be silly to say "here's what this looks like, but you won't see it for a while." Soon, though... very soon...