Wait so your trying to take the root and expand it? Your not trying to expand /opt at the expense of the VFAT partition?

What good is /opt when you want to install from the repos? Everything goes to /usr

Most of the applications in extras are suppose to install to /opt instead of normal root positions like /usr. The problems is when you install applications that haven't been tested (or optified yet) then those applications install to /usr thus eating up root space causing the memory issues.

Right now since most applications are in transition some are still using /usr when they should be transitioning towards using /opt.

Oh, this might be a good pointer. SDK is not extras however, and I wouldn't expect headers to be in /opt

I'll go check rightaway, if that's the case, that would make it much easier, I can symlink /opt to the SD easily and that would be fine...

Nope, from a quick glance at the hildon dev debs for instance, it's all in /usr

Running mkfs.ext3 on /dev/mmcblk0p1 currently...

Let's see...

OK, this has worked, now I have 26 Gig of free space on /home in ext3.

Now I'll try to move /usr - on a live system, very tricky, but no way around it. Let's see how it goes...

Is there a way to boot the N900 into pure console mode - recovery or something?

If I'm not mistaken, under Linux you can copy the filesystem to a new filesystem then "mount -o remount" it. Been a while since I did this so that might not be entirely accurate. Try googling "linux filesystem remount" (or move perhaps).

Oh, you'll have to change /etc/fstab afterwards of course (assuming its used in maemo).

I repeat: by installing certain packages from the SDK you'll trash your root filesystem. Use a chroot.

Gcc & headers are probably fine. Anything depending on bash is not.

Rootstrap is what the SDK unpacks on a target before attempting to apt-get.

You are right, I can confirm this. I had to reflash about 20 times, but I did succeed in compiling Emacs, it doesn't compile in scratchbox. However, yeah the root filesystem did go to hell and the N900 couldn't be rebooted. But now I have working GNU Emacs on the N900, yes!

Sorta reminds me of Angstrom on the Zaurus, it had the same symptoms, every once in a while you'd install a package and it would hose the whole system, no way around it...

So I thought, as it conflicts with busybox...

How can I generate a file system for chroot? This'll be easy, set up a directory on the MicroSD for the chroot. Is there a rootfs for download?