If you have already installed Rosetta on your Intel Mac in Snow Leopard, you may want to disable it, so as to prevent the system from running PowerPC apps without informing you that they are non-native to your system’s architecture. The reason for disabling Rosetta is not so much to save space (as it’s only 2.1MB), but more about keeping your system running native apps for higher performance.
To disable Rosetta, simply run the following command in Terminal:
sudo sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/RosettaNonGrata
To re-enable Rosetta after it’s been disabled, just run the following command in Terminal:
sudo sysctl -w kern.exec.archhandler.powerpc=/usr/libexec/oah/translate
These commands set a system environment variable that tells the system which program to run when you try to launch a non-native app: to ask you to install Rosetta, or to run it using Rosetta.
(View the rest of the article at 10.6: Disable and enable Rosetta via Terminal – Mac OS X Hints)
Other posts of Interest (By Tag)
Related posts (YARPP):
- A possible solution for system hang on Safari launch – Mac OS X Hints Evidently Safari may appear to hang, and cause slow system response if the Safari Cache files have been corrupted. — Snip — Recently, any time I tried to run Safari on 10.6 caused all apps and the Finder to hang with the spinning beach ball....
- Snow Leopard System Requirements Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6)’s system requirements are: Mac computer with an Intel processor 1GB of memory 5GB of available disk space DVD drive for installation So do not consider running Snow Leopard on any PPC machines… It simply will not work… But PowerPC...
- Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard I have been going through my archives, and re-discovered the Cult of Mac’s article on Why It’s Taken 10 Years from Carbon to Snow Leopard. Here’s my thoughts, and a link to the article… First, the first release of Mac OS X, was actually Mac...