Its nice to ssh into the N900, but I keep getting "command not found".
I managed to apt-get install bash and a few others, but am missing even basics like less/more, locate, diff .
I was a bit disappointed to see such a powerful device running BusyBox, but I assume there is a reason.
Is there a package or repository that provides a more complete GNU suite, as you'd get with a basic Debian install? (or even like on a jailbroken iphone/ipod)

the reason is simple - size of the root partition is just 256MB (it's fixed, you can't extend it)
there however are utilities like: more, find, cat, vi, grep, etc.. so you can live with it. locate is not extra necessary if you know how to use "find".

You can get other stuff from following the information at:

http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...5#Installation (via app manager)

or

http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba#Packages (via commandline)

Personally, I feel a lot better now I have less

diff is a particular issue. See: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3032

But there is a solution to that at: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...ghlight=diffmo

Do make sure you have enough space on / before doing a lot of installs, check df -h output.

I'm talking about the n900, not Diablo ... oh .. my ... it really is that small - 227MB actually, and mine is 89% full already.
Is that something that can be fixed by copying e.g. /usr/lib into /home/opt and sym-linking from the original location?

Actually, isn't this the sort of reason why we have both /bin and /usr/bin - so you can have a small root device, and put the bulk in /usr on the big one. Is the main store too slow for /usr?
I take it the 256MB is high-speed flash, and the other partitions are in the slower 32MB flash. I'd test it, but cannot find hdparm.

" du -sxh / " says 341MB. Whats gone wrong there? rootfs compression of some sort?

Like you are not stuck back in the 1980s?
Thanks for the info - I added the tools repository. Will get less and diffmo. Now to read User:Jebba while waiting for "apt-get update" to complete.

edit: ok, I see that diffmo has installed into /home/opt/maemo/usr/bin/.
Maybe we need to install packages with "apt-get install --root=/opt/maemo ..." to avoid filling root?

I think it's more to-do with what needs to be available during boot and at other times. I did read a highly informative discussion about the decisions surrounding /opt, but unfortunately didn't bookmark it.
The idea of /usr + symlinks certainly came up, but a different way was chosen for some reason.

I claimed back a fair bit of space from the rootfs as posted at: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...137#post428137

Haven't had any noticeable problems with that so far. It''s not a well tested approach however.

I basically did things like:

Good question! I've no idea!

Well, packages are supposed to put their bigger files under /opt, with symlinks if necessary - do a search on "optification", but not all packages do this (even some of the system packages, as can be seen in my post linked above!)

And yes, for being stuck in the 1980's there's a spectrum emulator if I want it

Ah, I was wondering what "optification" meant.
What a kludge!

For an alternative to symlinks see this:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=35122

Also note /home get's mounted rather late so it would fail to boot if you did the symlinks only.

Note there are 3 or 4 solutions in that thread.

If you want a complete GNU system, you can create a chroot.

I thought he whole point of Unix having /usr is for the files that are not needed at boot time. Why is Maemo different?

And linking all those files from /opt/.../bin back to /usr/bin is over-complicated when you could just add the new bin directory to the PATH.

Is that overkill? I'd have thought it neater to put all the gnu utils in /opt , then just for interactive shells add PATH=/opt/bin:$PATH so the gnu utils over-ride the busybox ones.
As well as adding /opt/lib to ld.so.conf and so forth. I just don't get why they would use all those symlinks instead. Is there a good reason for not using the PATH ?