I was just playing around with my new N900 and at some point of time - after installing a lot of apps - I ran into the problem, that I couldn't install apps anymore. So I started uninstalling. At some point of time i figured out that rootfs "/" is quite full (2k left or so ).

And it also looks like that how much is stored on rootfs is variable. That means some applications use that space. Which is bad because there is not much left.

So is there a way to increase the rootfs? Or is there a way to get things away from rootfs?

No, you can't increase it as it's on a separate 256MB flash chip. If you installed apps from extras-testing or extras-devel, they are probably the culprits here. Apps above 500kB are supposed to install to /opt, which is checked before apps are moved from extras-testing to extras. Keep uninstalling and do check which apps make a difference in space on /, then file bugs against these in bugzilla.

Sord, back-breaking-work.

Anyway. Wrong installation doesn't cause variable usage of rootfs. Is rootfs somehow a tmp-dir for applications?

Or how can I find out which apps are installed on rootfs?
Or how can I find out which directories are on which filesystem?

If you've just installed a load of apps then it may be you've run into the bug where the downloaded install files aren't properly cleared up until the next reboot.

Perhaps you could do an apt-get clean and see if that helps?

ssh into your N900 (or use xterm on the device):
To know which directories are on which filesystem use
To see the available free space on each filesystem use
To find large directories do this:

How do apps get promoted from Extras-devel to Extras-testing ?

Why isnt the /OPT check done before apps get promoted to Extras-testing ?

That way all apps in Extras and Extras-testing would be OPTIFIED and only apps in Extras-devel could cause this problem.

The maintainer presses a button to promote it, when they feel it's ready to be used by a wider audience. Some basic sanity checks are automated (all dependencies must be available etc). See https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras-devel#...extras-testing for the details.

Because optification is rather new. There's certainly been discussions of having the build bot (that builds packages for extras-*) optify them unless developers opt out (pun not intended), but it's not implemented yet.

I understand there may already be a number of packages in Extras-testing that are not yet optified, but surely now that we know about the problem, we should be preventing any NEW packages making it to Extras-testing without being Optified.

I'm not a developer, so I don't know about the build bot optifying things automatically.

I was just thinking more along the lines that one of the Promotion Checks the package interface could do is to check if it is Optified or not. If it is not Optified, the promotion fails.

Sadly, that wasn't exactly I was looking for. At least, I know this commands, but I want is to cd into I directory then send a command which tells me, to which fs this directory belongs to.

Back to the topic: Rebooting did help free some space on rootfs. My next step was to continue installing a bunch of apps combined with several reboots. That didn't improve the situation, but also with rebooting it also didn't went worse. So I continued until my devices froze on rebooting. So I had to flash my device (no backups of course ). And of course I didn't remember the last application I installed. So I continue with the next topic - how to keep rootfs clean/empty?

Btw. I only managed to flash my N900 under windows. Linux somehow didn't work (resource busy or can't get usb address or something alike where the error messages).