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OS X Leopard: Uninstalling Dev and Unix Tools

Published by marco on

Installing OS X Leopard on my old 1.4GHz PowerPC 1GB Mac Mini went surprisingly well. I used Lacie SilverKeeper to back up my Tiger hard drive before wiping it out and doing a clean installation. I avoided installing all of the extra languages and printer drivers and managed to save several gigabytes of hard drive space for other stuff.

The only thing I had trouble installing was rdiff-backup, which is a UNIX utility for performing backups. OS X Leopard sports the vaunted Time Machine for its own backups, but I run a Linux Debian Etch server, which I back up across the wire using rdiff-backup. I followed the instructions for installing on OS X—which were much the same as what I’d once done for OS X Tiger—but lost patience. In order to install this UNIX utility, I need to build it from source. In order to have a working C-compiler, I need gcc. The only known way to install a reliable version of that is to install the developer tools from Apple, which means installing 2GB worth of XCode. It also means installing an extra 600MB of “UNIX-compatible” command-line utilities on top of that, which are probably what the build system in MacPorts or Fink is going to need. Oh yeah, MacPorts and Fink are Linux-style package managers for OS X which also download and install an uncomfortably large number of files.

Once you’ve bit the bullet and installed MacPorts and XCode, you can try installing the packages for rdiff-backup, if you have the patience. Compiling on this poor old machine is like watching paint dry … and MacPorts compiles everything. Though Leopard sports version 2.5 of Python, MacPorts was halfway through compiling its own 2.4 version (after setting up other things for what must have been more than an hour) before I throttled it in its crib. Enough is enough; I’m using a Mac here, for Christ’s sake.

If you, like me, would like to completely undo the mistakes you’ve made (i.e. you don’t plan on using XCode yet and don’t plan on using any other Unix utilities), here are some simple commands you can use to eradicate all traces of MacPorts and XCode.[1]

To remove all installed ports applications (including half-compiled proggies), open a Terminal window and execute:

sudo port -f uninstall installed

To remove all traces of MacPorts itself, open a Terminal window and execute:

sudo rm -rf /opt/local \
/Applications/MacPorts \
/Applications/DarwinPorts \
/Library/Tcl/macports1.0 \
/Library/Tcl/darwinports1.0 \
/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.macports.* \
/Library/StartupItems/DarwinPortsStartup \
/Library/Receipts/MacPorts*.pkg \
/Library/Receipts/DarwinPorts*.pkg \
~/.macports

To remove XCode, open a Terminal window and execute:

sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

There. Now you’re back to a relatively clean, standard OS X installation without a lot of Unix-y clutter.


[1] Tips for removal found at the MacPorts FAQ and How to Uninstall Xcode.