I messed up my $HOME!
 

Hi,
I had a brilliant idea to make room: to move my /home/user to the internal memory card, and make a link:

ln -s /media/mmc2/HOME /home/user

Soon I discovered that my brilliant idea was stupid. First, because my gnome setups are not saved. Secondly, because when I plug the N800 to my PC, /media/mmc2 gets unmounted making another mess...

So, what to do? Do I need to revert my brilliant idea and copy everything back to /home/user?

Thanks!
L.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

you would need to use a real file system like ext2 or 3. mounting it at /home rather then use a symlink would make sense as well

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

Yes, put /home/user back, but you can symlink other parts of home, for instance the document directories under MyDocs. Find out what specific directories are using up the most space, and symlink only those ones.

And yes, you can only symlink directories that can be stored on FAT partitions, so no executables, symlinks, etc are possible inside the symlinked directories.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

I had that way, but so many things symlinked that I thought it would be better to.... :P

I think you meant the opposite. You can symlink to ext2/3. And my card is ext3, so it should be no problems. But for some reason it didn't work. Not sure why.

EDIT: I put /home/user back, and everything went back to normal.

Thanks!!!!

L.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

Sorry I wasn't clear, and I was even a bit wrong. If you are using your standard SD card (which should have a FAT partition as the first partition for a few good reasons), then you will be symlinking to FAT, which is lacking a few things that are available on ext2/ext3 partitions.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

Sure. But I've already reformatted my card to ext3.

Thanks,
L.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

You should always leave a token FAT partition on your card to be automounted by Maemo. Please search the forums for the reasons why it isn't an especially good idea to have your SD card entirely formatted as a linux filesystem.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

Wow... I didn't know. I will search for that. In any case, my card is being automounted nicely as ext3.

EDIT: I searched about ext3, and the problem seems to be the finite write cycle of SD cards. Unfortunately, i do need to use symlinks (my sdcard now has, literally, tens of thousands of links), so I cannot use FAT.

I read to mount the card with the noatime option to save writings. How/where do I do this? Certainly not in the fstab file, that works only for the external card...

Thanks!!
L.

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

hm, maybe a manual umount / mount...

also, are you sure it is auto-mounting as ext3? I suspect it is mounting ext2...

Re: I messed up my $HOME!
 

This is not practical. The card is automatically mounted each time the device is unplugged from the computer (or turned on). Where is the automouting config?

The maemo 'df' command does not say which fs is being assigned to each device, and 'dmesg' says nothing about that. How do I know this?

Thanks, and sorry for the silly questions...

Cheers,
L.