Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

Well this I can agree with. The damn AIX admins at my work place persist in making the goddamn home directory 50MB because thats the base amount IBM give it in the install. Spend half my life trying to get more room allocated. - Thank God for smart filesystems. As for Solaris - dont get me started :). I guess you are right and it does come down to the individual admin. In the case of the N900 however Nokia have obviously tried to follow the FHS to a greater extent. More than anything I was trying to point out that the issue here is not Nokia "being stupid" but rather the end user not taking responsibility for installing software out of testing/devel.
Remember - just when you think you have made something idiot proof - they go and build a better idiot.

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

That is absolutely correct Bratag... I certainly didn't mean to sound like I was calling Nokia stupid in any sense. On the contrary.. I said things like /opt are mostly used for more mobile or space-constrained systems.

I also said it was a great idea.. that if adhered to 100% would definitely be beneficial. But in this case, I think they have cause a few more *immediate* problems than if they had left the full 32GB on root (/)... but on the flip side... doing the latter would have likely caused more *long-term* problems.. once a user has found a way to fill up 32GB of space in software and/or movies on their root drive.

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

Oh, and just to prove that I'm not a complete idiot... Ubuntu, one of the most common Desktop Linux's now:

https://help.ubuntu.com/7.04/install...86/apcs03.html
If you allow Ubuntu to partition your drive for you (the "easy" way).. it will create a single / partition.

Not saying it's right or wrong.. just saying it's common. And it's one I personally employ, but just because I understand the risks and keep a watch on my HDD space with several different tools.

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

putting stuff on the root-partition (or system partition when talking windows) isnt something i would feel comfortable doing.
i mean, even in windows i strictly keep my windows-partition free of anything not windows-related, although its not necessarely needed in windows.

thats why i asked if you can tell beforehand where a program is going to install itself. or consequently, if its possible to clean the system-partition from non-system programs if they installed themself to that location (will a simple uninstall of a program delete everything?).
or if you can customize the install-location, even though it seems that in linux these locations are pre-determined.

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

MSA

Refer to the very last line of post #16 on the last page.

The only way to tell where a program WILL go is to extract it yourself.. but those two links explain the other half of your question.

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

If you have the .deb file you can do dpkg --contents <pkg> and that will give you a listing.

Once installed you can do dpkg -L <pkg> to get a listing of the files and where they went.

Found that handy a couple of times

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

Try this before reflashing! It may fix your device without needing to blow everything out:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=37420

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

thanks guys for all your support.
i finally did it and fixed it.
but how can i avoid that happening again.
how to stop the reboot thing, that freezes the mobile

Re: N900 Dead in 4 days
 

As I understand it the /opt partition was a very last-minute decision which is why I called Nokia stupid. When you only have a 256MB root its rather obvious from the start you are going to need to decide where to install applications, as it sure as hell wont be on root.

Also the way the N900 uses root seems odd. Earlier I got the out of memory message for the first time, because UNINSTALLING software had filled up my root. I mean WTF?

Knowing this is a big issue, why didn't Nokia make it easier to find out what is taking up space on root? Its all bad worse of course by the "not releasing free space" bug which is supposed to be fixed when the holy firmware update finally comes out.

I love my N900, but to say Nokia didn't make some pretty silly mistakes would be an understatement. I mean stripping the NAT related modules out of the kernel for a start when every other mobile device around these days can run as a MiFi with a simple application install. The fact my friend with a 5800XM can do things my N900 cannot is plain crazy. And no I do not mean phone features, Nokia supposedly sacrificed phone functionality for a full Linux NIT, but its missing core components of Linux for it to deliver as promised.

It should have been EASIER on Linux, not require hacking around compiling new kernels. Its unacceptable that a Linux based device requires hacking to get things working that Linux has been able to do out of the box for years. Its near impossible to find a router that ISN'T running on Linux, yet here we are with the most important features missing on the N900.