I was wondering if anybody could help me with the following problem, its a little bit difficult for me to explain it fully because I am completely new to linux and maemo and its a bit of a confusing situation with multiple problems, so please bear with me:

Ok let me start at the beginning....

I would love to start using Linux (Ubuntu 9.04 is what I tried). I installed this onto a Live USB (persistant) following some guides off the net. I did this because I work away from home a lot for my job and I only have a company laptop (at the moment), hence booting from USB. Up to this point everything was fine and worked really well, and I managed to have a breif play with my first Linux based OS.

The reason I wanted a Linux system was to install the Maemo 5 SDK to just have a play around and see what it was all about. I am quite good with computers/software etc but all my knowledge is Windows based, so thought this might be a way to branch out and learn some code/programming etc.

I followed the instructions from the Forum Nokia site and managed to get as far as the SDK installation (after Scratchbox and Xephyr parts) before an error came up saying that I had ran out of disc space.

I am using a Kingston Traveller 16GB pen drive, and I used the 3GB casper-rw file when I was installing Ubuntu. I used the larger casper-rw file because I thought that this would be best for installing modifications etc - that's what I understand that it is for?

I am guessing now but I assume that this "casper-rw" acts like a system drive - so like program files etc get stored here?? The reason why it was 3 GB was because the usb drive was FAT32 formatted, I know I could have re-sized it to just under 4GB but I'm guessing this wouldn't be enough either.

Basically I would like to know the following:

1) Is it possible to install the SDK (and/or components) somewhere else so I do not run out of disc space - if that is the problem

2) or (if the size of the casper-rw is the problem) can I re-format to NTFS and make this file much larger (say 8 GB) - not sure if Linux works with NTFS or the installation of Ubuntu will work?

3) If none of these are the problem could someone please explain and give me a solution.

Any help with this or any other solutions would be greatly appreciated. I have the following constraints:

1) I can't really install anything on the company machine, so if there is a windows based SDK I can't really use it
2) Also I can't muck about with the drives to dual boot from second HD - the second HD is used for storage etc

If I have missed any important information out please forgive me as I said above when it comes to this stuff I am quite far out of my depth! Not sure if it's relevent but I am also getting an N900, which is the whole reason I got into this.

I would really like to get to learn Linux and would love to learn enough to contribute back to the maemo community with any apps etc when I get good enough!

Thanks in advance

For the SDK/Scratchbox I think 5 GB is going to be Minimum, it has been a while since I installed it in the VM image that I build (Virtual PC if you have access to that?) is around 7GB when everything is installed. So I would recommend you have probably 8GB file for safety. ;-)

Correct, from what I gather, the casper-rw is your drive that everything is installed to for linux. You probably need at least a 5gb file. Scratchbox v1 is LARGE.

I'm not really familure with how casper-rw work; but in Linux you can have multiple drive mounted to wherever you need them. I assume casper-rw much be doing this. On the VM I do work on I have three "vm" drives. One for my source code; one for my "temp/apt-get" stuff, and the primary. I just "mount"ed them to existing directories on the main "primary" drive so that everything goes into the proper directories.

I would up the file to 8gb, The underlying NTFS should not be an issue I think. The casper-rw appears to be acting like a Virtual Drive.



1. No windows sdk, so don't worry about that.
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2. Does your box have Virtual PC? or VMWare, VirtualBox? If so, their you can download the image and use it. (If not any chance you can get permission from your work to install Microsoft Virtual PC?) You could then have your VM image on your USB stick.

3. Their is one other possibility; but it would currently require a LOT of work; but I believe it could all run from a USB stick. I'm looking into this, but have not had time to finish trying it out and simplifing it to a couple scripts).

Nathan
P.s. Can a Moderator move this to the Development forum.

I will try re-formatting to NTFS and increasing the casper-rw to 8 GB and try the install/download again. I will also post again if it has worked and there are any other issues etc.

Thanks for your help.

Also can not install anything on the works machine so VM is out the window, unfortunatly!

I have hit a major brick wall!!

I have tried everything I can find on the net to get this working but with no joy!

The main problem that I have is that the USB needs to be formatted to FAT32 for the installation to work, and with that I am limited to a 4GB file size for the casper-rw file. I did try the installation using the following as a guide:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/usb-ubu...stall-windows/

with the pen drive NTFS formatted and I increased the casper-rw file to about 8.8 GB using another piece of software of the net, which worked but it just didn't boot up, after looking at the files in explorer that were actually on the pen drive it seemed to have everything it needed, so I am guessing that the "makeboot.bat" that comes with the installation files can not make an NTFS partition boot up? As I said before, I am really getting out of my depth here so please understand if any of this sounds stupid.

Is there anyway I can either create new or edit the installation files so that they work with the NTFS formatted pen drive? I can then make that casper-rw as big as possible (8GB or more even).

Or is there a better way to get round this, by having mutiple casper-rw files which "fill up" one by one automatically so i don't have to mess around with changing were files install to everytime one gets full?

If I am going about this the wrong way and/or there is an easier way to get round this problem please let me know. It seems stupid that you can't just install as much as you like, why does this casper-rw file have to be used, is it like that on an ordinary install of Ubuntu (i.e. on a laptop) or does it store the files differently?

It seems strange that it is not more like windows where the only limitation is the actual size of the disc??

Thanks

It's nothing like this on a normal install, what you're doing is the equivalent of a LiveCD image on a USB stick, plus the casper 'overlay' file for saving changes. Such a setup is highly unsuited to serious use.

If your PC has the ability to boot from USB drives used as hard disks you could try running the ordinary installer and treating the stick as just another HD. I'm not completely sure that would work, but if it did it would allow you to reformat the stick with a Linux native filesystem which would allow access to the full space.

An alternative would be to look at installing Ubuntu onto the laptop's internal disk - if you use the 'Wubi' installer it sets it all up through Windows and there's no need to repartition the disk, and you can uninstall it like a normal Windows app.

Are you booting from the USB Stick, or are you booting from the Live CD?

If you are booting from the USB stick, then I would recommend you just reformat the USB stick as a boot disk in Ubutu and do a fresh install not using the casper-rw stuff.

If you are booting for the CD/DVD then I'm not sure the solution using the Live CD method.


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I've been playing with another method that I believe will work.

http://portableubuntu.demonccc.com.ar/ Portable Ubuntu -- I believe it can be setup to run natively from windows and have the SB installed in it properly. This would let you have all your dev stuff on the USB stick, including its "container" file. I believe you can use this on a NTFS drive.

Nathan.

Thanks for these comments, after reading this I now realise that the casper-rw system is not the "standard" way of doing an install but rather a way around saving changes on the live setup. Please see post below for eventual solution!

I have decided, after reading the comments on this thread that the easiest thing for me to do was the following:

I created an installation disc of Ubuntu 9.10, took apart an old WD passport (250GB) and installed this in place of my primary HDD on my laptop. Installed the OS just like you would do as normal (from CD), then re-assembled the external HDD and replaced primary HDD in the laptop --> I did this because I am not sure how to image/install an OS directly to USB external drives??

Booted from USB and that was that. I can now boot from USB and save changes with a much larger amount of installing space. The reason why I did not image the USB pen drive was the fact it is too small, or will run out of space very quickly.

Thanks for all your help with this. Just goes to show how useful sites like this are!