Maximizing memory utilization on the Nokia 770
 

I'm not entirely familiar with the Nokia 770's file system, but my understanding is that the flash memory is shared between the main file system and the working memory used by running applications. If this is true, then does installing additional applications (which can only be installed on the internal flash memory, not a RS-MMC card), doesn't this reduce the amount of available working memory?

On the same note, is it possible to uninstall other programs (like the crappy email client or the news reader) to free up memory? Has anyone tried this? Does it work? Or are the partitions pre-sized in the flashed filesystem (possibly requiring tweaks)?

Are there any custom flash images that already exclude some of the unnecessary applications?

There is RAM and flash in Nokia 770. It has 64 MB ram, 128 Flash. Of that 128 Flash, around 60 MB is reserved for the OS and the preinstalled apps. Rest is userspace.

storing email on MMC?
 

I just got my 770 yeseterday from CUSA and was wondering if it was possible to store the email on the MMC? i've got a 512MB in there and would rather have email located there...

Thanks!

I've been thinking about doing this and have tried this series of steps - you need xterm installed.

$ cd /home
$ cp -R user/ /media/mmc1/
$ mv user user.sav
$ ln -s /media/mmc1/user user

Unfortunately the mv fails with a Permission denied error, even if I use chmod 777 user to set all the protection bits, which probably means getting root access before it will work :(

Ideas anyone?

Yeah, generally you'd need root access to modify the "/home" directory, which includes renaming items within it, or creating new items such as a symlink.

With root, however, there should be no problem at all with it, although I'd probably use cp -a /home/user /media/mmc1/user, rather than -R as this will preserve symlinks, modification times etc.

By default, the MMC card is formatted as FAT - a DOS file format - meaning it can't hold all the semantics of the Unix file system which /home/user is within. If it's a problem for you, you can relatively easily reformat the MMC to a "proper" Unix FS.

Cheers,

Andrew

Guess it's time to take the plunge ...

Ta.

I've a Ubuntu box I can do that on. Question is, what fs type is best - ext3? - and will it still be sharable with a PC as a USB drive.

Andy

As konttori mentioned: there is 64MB ram. This is for the active applications. Thus freeing up the home folder will not free up memory for funning more active applications simultaniously.
For this you should use a swap file on your mmc card. This works (perfectly?) on mine and allows me to work with multiple browser windows and other applications open side by side.
See this thread for activating swap: http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...2&page=2&pp=10

If you want to free up flash memory for new applications and or emails and stuff, you could just use the mmc card for your large files like videos and mp3. For ease of use, you could possibly free up some flash space by making the .videos and .sounds directories in /home/user/Mydocs/ symlinks to the mmc card.

Okay, I was wrong about sharing the 128MB internal flash between working memory and file system memory - there is no mention at all of RAM on Nokia's 770 Features page. Very good to see that there is RAM dedicated for working memory.

And Dirk, yours is a good suggestion - I set up a couple of 16M swap files on my supplied RS-MMC card last week, and I even added a couple of application icons in the Utilities menu to swapon and swapoff them (I only use it when necessary; I don't want to wear out the card).

I tried setting up swap files on the root filesystem (internal flash), but swapon wouldn't accept paths on the root partition. I'm better off, though, since I'd rather wear out an RS-MMC card than the internal flash!