Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

One "s" less :)

But yeah this is exactly what this thread is primarily about :)

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

What different between: create
1) Separate FAT 2GB partition
2) FAT image which is expandable (Titan's method).
Is the second way more convenient since the image size is actual need and sometime we store maps and pictures from camera more than 2GB (just in case).
Is there any different performance between them?
Thanks.

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

the second one is slower, but more flexible.
Camera and maps don't require a FAT partition (anymore),
i.e. MyDocs can be a normal folder on ext3.
you can loopmount the FAT image on another folder (e.g $HOME/Extern)
and export it via USB.

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

Well found some new limitation. Maemo5 expects /usr available early init(/sbin/preinit relies on it). So if you do offload /usr and then rm the old /usr your device will stop booting up.

I guess I'll modify my script to use /usr/local for storage now.

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

Yep, you can only move parts of /usr

I've been experimenting, with frequent reflashes due to moving some parts of /usr that were needed early on and it wouldn't boot, haven't gotten around to getting rescue menu working, so that I could jump to rescue shell when not booting and move stuff back. I've had about hundred reflashes already, no BS...

Anyhow, I've moved and symlinked the following from /usr/ and it boots:

doc
games
include
local
man
src
var

and the following from /usr/share/

autoconf
fonts
games
icons
lbreakout2
libtool
locale
mc
microb-engine
mime
nokia-maps
perl
perl5
pixmaps
sounds
themes
tutorial-applet
zoneinfo

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

Well rescue shell wouldn't help much since it relies on things in /usr/lib and /usr/bin

libcal* and text2screen and awk and cut from what I can tell.

Sad that M5 doesn't follow the FHS :(

I guess I'll keep / as is and rebuild stuff to use /usr/local

Should be a better solution than symlinking stuff all over the place.

A nice way of a rescue shell would be an initramfs. But I haven't been able to generate a small enough initramfs(needs to be ~200kb since the kernel is 1.7MB and apparently the max size that can be flashed into the kernel part is 2MB :(

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

You mean not touch root and rebuild all user progs to use /usr/local ? What's the difference between this and optifying?

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

Optifying - doing a symlink forest
/usr/local - just add /usr/local/bin and keep on running

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

True.

I have a better solution even, which I've been getting around to posting for these couple of weeks.

Anyhow, what I've done is created a shell script wrapper via dynamically exporting paths etc. which enables you to what I call optlink any package installed anywhere.

The benefit of this is, it doesn't require root privileges, I just optlink all the apps into a ~/root and ~/links directories and it enables you to have multiple instances/different versions of the package installed, to remove just optunlink it, it just removes the symlinks in these directories all the paths get reexported and your system is clean, you don't mess with anything...

I've been using it some time now, works great, also on a PC.

Need to post a complete guide on this.

You then install apps just by unpacking anywhere, again no root privs, and optlinking it...

I've got all the GNU tools installed this way, not messing with busybox etc.

Re: Repartition the internal drive
 

Sounds like GNU Stow or some other such tool.

I just built my own gcoreutils and gtar. Might even do the same for the others. Just prefixed with g. Like it more than the gnu-* packages in extras which install inte $PREFIX/bin/gnu