Couple of things:

First, let me recuperate for clarification:


From Factory the N900 basically has the following "physical" partitioning sceme:

- 256MB "root" on a seperate (faster) chip as ubifs
- 2GB /home on mmc as ext3
- 27GB /home/MyDocs on mmc as vfat which will be exported to usb on demand
+ in addition about 27 virtual partitions via remount or link or whatever


This partition scheme causes problems because
- many foreign packets install in "root" which runs out of space
- native packages put their data into the /home partition (via remount in /opt/... ), which is small.
- an open opposition towards vfat in general for 42 geekish reasons (as in 'true, but my mom would never notice the difference')

- we cannot just resize "root" (repartition) because it's on a seperate physical device.
- we cannot get rid of the vfat-partition completely because the camera application (anything else?) can only store data on vfat
- some users might need vfat for MS-Windows compatibility


Is this about correct or did I miss something?


Now moving on:

1. When doing the VFAT via the sparse image: does it shrink again once files are removed? Someone mentioned earlier that it wouldn't...

2. If it's just the camera, what about having it store data onto the SD? There's already an option for that builtin. I use the SD for photos anyway, so it wouldn't be much of a loss
Plus a removable card is much easier to repartition when size requirements change than the internal memory. And unlike windows the N900 does detect and automount SD-cards with multiple partitions on them.


Dreaming further: I don't use Windows, so with the camera shooting to SD, to hell with the internal vfat partition. Could I instead just get one large ext3-partition containing /home (and /home/MyDocs as a subfolder if I must) and export that to usb?
ext4 would also be interesting, but I'm not sure wether the N900's kernel supports it

Would such a setup have any other nasty side effects? Say Memory-settings GUI-integration and stuff?

As for installing foreign packages: I don't completely understand yet how this works exactly, but couldn't we just "export" /usr/ to the large flash the same way /opt/ is exported now? Shouldn't that solve the problem and be a lot easier than migrating "root" to a LVM on a live system?


Off topic:

I have found the performance of SDcards to be largely independant of their classification. Using a transcend class6 card now which gives exactly the specified 6MB/s write and slow reads, wheras my old Sandisk Class2 card gives me 16MB/s write and 30MB/s reads. Major break-ins when the card is near full, but it's definitely significantly faster in daily use nontheless.
So no, it's not the N900's cardreader that's slow, it's the cards!



Yeah, those were the days! Big, ugly brick that Universal was. Nice video playback for the time, though. And I do miss the keyboard!