How much space should be used on the rootfs assuming you have no applications installed?

I flashed and have 66MB free before installing any applications - but this doesn't seem like much.

256mb - 163mb binary flash = 93mb
I guess by the time we've factored in bytes for the flash and bits for the memory this could be the 66mb I see in Conky?

The binary flash is highly compressed - if you check the actual usage (du -hsx /) then you can see that there's about 375M of data on the rootfs. The rootfs is also compressed (which is why it's only using 190M), but at a far level (otherwise reading/writing would be too slow and too CPU intensive).

Doesn't seem to make much sense to me to have this small 1gb of memory with 256mb partitioned for the os - but then to compress it. wouldn't the device be faster if the os was on the emmc and not compressed?

either way thanks for the response that my 66mb free on rootfs is normal.

What 1G? There's only a 256M OneNAND chip, all of which is used for the rootfs. And the compression has very little performance impact - it's usually offset by the fact that there's less to read from the disk/flash. Performance tests have shown that the eMMC is significantly (orders of magnitude) slower for some operations - I don't know whether those are the most used operations or not though (I'd hope that Nokia did some analysis before deciding on this setup). There's also the issue with flashing - at the level the flasher is operating, it has to write the entire flash device. If the rootfs was on the eMMC then every flash would wipe all user data as well.