Notices

I've got just one non optified application, ScummVM, all my other apps are "optified". Even removing ScummVM the % of free space in root is significantly low, I think that in the future with the growing of this common libraries we'll all have serious problems... C'mon 256MB for rootfs is just riddiculous.

I agree that libraries can and do take up a lot of space, but it hasn't gotten me into trouble yet.

Are we agreed that this is a false conjecture? I'd like to keep from propagating rumors as much as possible so the thread title should be changed.

Some (all ?) the offscreen games are written with Qt, and these libs aren't optified in the current firmware, I would say that Qt alone can take +20Mb of rootfs space, this issue will be fixed once Qt 4.6 become the default.

.....in Harmattan, not Fremantle. At this point we dont even know if the N900 will support the update.

Humm ? I meant the default over Qt 4.5 currently installed, not the system default for the entire UI, lol.

EDIT: Qt 4.6 already available in Extras-devel is fully optified .

Hm, how will these games handle the update or the change from nonopt to opt libraries? Wouldn't they still be dependent to where they are now and this version? Hope for the developers to update?

I constantly only have around 85-90% full on my rootfs. About 20-40MB free. I don't see this as an issue.
I installed a bunch of stuff from ovi store today. Many games, some apps etc. My rootfs freespace increased after a reboot. =P

It's not going to break your software. Moving libraries in a running system isn't a small undertaking, so it will have to be done with precaution.

I changed the thread name to something less likely to cause a fuss now that the question has been answered.

Jakiman: I've noticed that. I think it's due to the increased compression of the ubifs that was set up in the update.

And while people are at it, they should learn how to use du. Here are some pointers. Du stands for "disk usage" and reports how many megabytes (or kilobytes) all your directories use up. Most people want to start with:

du -h -d 1 /

Where "1" is the amount of levels of directories du looks into. This command would list only the root level directories and their disk usage.

-h is "human readable form", which shows a mix of megabytes and kilobytes.

After that, you might want to try

du -k -d 3 /lib /var /usr | sort -n

Which would list three levels of disk usage for directories /lib /var and /usr and sort them in ascending order. You could add other directories too, that you found to use more than a megabyte of space with the first command. But don't add /home, since that is part of your big partition and will include a huge amount of space hoggers that you aren't really that interested in.

I have the following directories grabbing more than 20 megabytes:

21376 /usr/bin
22240 /usr/lib/microb-engine
22248 /var/lib/dpkg/info
25492 /var/lib/dpkg
28676 /usr/lib/python2.5
44552 /var/lib
52944 /var
83636 /usr/share
179524 /usr/lib
290928 /usr

Naturally, the 44 552 kilobytes (43 megabytes) that /var/lib uses is included in the 52 944 that /var uses. So don't count them twice.

This is a good way to see what takes up a lot of space. I found, for instance, that my Nokia Maps uses 10 megs:

9484 /usr/share/nokia-maps/html

Is the Ovi Maps -application actually a HTML-based app? Really? It's got stylesheets and index.html and the works. And how come it isn't optified? Couldn't I just symlink that directory from some partition with more space? If I needed more rootfs space, that is. Right now I don't.

Wow, I've just tried this:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=40307
The second method described by Mece is absolutely working, my free space in rootfs increased from 10% to 20%. Didn't know that python had been recently optified. Have a look.