Thread: Root space - What is "optifying"?
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texaslabrat is offline texaslabrat
2010-01-12 , 16:47
Posts: 271 | Thanked: 220 times | Joined on Sep 2009
#27
Originally Posted by fatalsaint View Post
So using your df output and the assumption that they are *partitions* and not separate flash memory...

Could it not be possible to delete the /home/user/MyDocs partition of 27GB and resize the /home partition to fill that space.. thus giving /opt the full 30+GB of available space for applications? Ext2/3 support resizing - I imagine since we're using symlinks at least / is ext2/3, what about /home? A small FAT partition could be used for the Camera (as I read that it won't work if a certain folder is ext2/3).
Yes, you could do that but then you would lose the ability to easily plug-n-pray with windows devices (though maybe you in particular don't care about that).

Also, symlinking /usr, /lib, and /var in the same way would also cause the rootfs to be virtually unused correct? It would be mostly a glorified boot partition with configuration files (/etc)? (Or mounting over existing /usr, /lib, and /var with the bind option to achieve the same effect?)
Not really an option due to the way that the system boots up and the order of operations in mounting the various volumes. I tried to move some stuff via symlink similar to how you suggested and it made the device unbootable. There is a utility floating around that will symlink pseudo-optify things on a per-application basis (using the apt-cache to figure out the necessary files and such) which will only move those things that are GUI-based (and thus not dependencies for booting).

And for anybody wondering why the numbers don't add up to exactly 256MB or 32GB, it's because every filesystem type has overhead of it's own. When you format a drive in NTFS, FAT/32, Ext2, Ext3, etc - it uses a part of the space to store it's own information to know what all is going on with that partition. This is why the rootfs shows "227.9M" for example instead of 256.
In addition to the formatting overhead, the difference between a "Megabyte" and a "Mebibyte" causes some of the discrepency Storage is sold in the former, most computer systems/utilities (including df) use the latter.