Thursday, July 17, 2008

How to uninstall an OS X preference pane - as an admin user

Dang. I've always removed Preference Panes by hunting them down in the file system.

Turns out there's an official way (with one catch) that works in 10.4 and 10.5:
Mac 101: Remove unwanted System Preference panes - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) To uninstall System Preference panes, just right-click (or control click if you have a one button mouse) on the preference pane icon and select 'remove x preference pane.'
The catch is, you need to be logged in as an administrative user! If you're a non-admin user you don't see anything; there's not even a "gray menu" (tested in 10.4). That's why I never noticed it -- I don't run as an admin user. I'm used to OS X asking for a privilege escalation for admin tasks.

So this is not well implemented in 10.4. It should be a menu item for non-admin users, and ask for a un/pw when it's selected. I wonder if Apple fixed that in 10.5?

No comments:

Post a Comment