Hi,

I have run across several similar posts on the forums, and was trying to find out what the best practices for the externam SD card. I got my N810 the night before last, flashed with the newest Diablo release and installed apps.

In essence, I am a Linux geek, so I have formatted the card and put an ext2 filesystem on it (was considering a journalling one, either riserfs (my preference) or ext3. On one hand, I was concerned about the number of writes to the card, but on the other hand, by the time it fails, I should be able to get a 16GB or 32GB card for next to nothing.

So my question is the use of the card. I would like to use both the internal and external as efficiently as possible, whether it means splitting the apps etc between the internal and external or installing the whole ball of wax to the external card. My main concern here is that I don't want to paint myself into a corner of some wierd configuration which will be unmanageable when it comes time to reflash.

As much as I hate doing it, I could symlink directories from /media/mmc2 to /media/mmc1. Or is there a way to tell apps to look on /media/mmc1? For instance, I am going to have to several large directories, e.g. my gpodder directory, movies, etc, as well as things like openvpn that I would prefer on the 8GB card.

Thanks,
--vr

The cards work formatted FAT from the factory. I never tried ext2 formatted cards with the tablet. Perhaps all applications allow you to select the default source location of data. I've moved all data to the internal and external cards to make more room for application installs.

You can tell many programs where to look. For example, gpodder has a such a preference. Likewise, Canola, which I use for movies, expects things to be on a card. You'll likely be someone who will put the system on a card, and you'll find penguinbait in his long first post gives some good info along the lines you're asking, so look here.

i am a newbie of a few weeks.

i have an 8GB sdhc in inetrnal(mmc2) and a 16GB sdhc external(mmc1)

i went ahead and did the penguinbait clone onto mmc2 internal and all my big files like music and movies are on the external card.

now i cannot seem to get media player or canola to see any of the files on the external card. i also have kagu media player and it had no trouble scanning for and finding the music on all of my cards.

is there a way i can force canola and media player to look in the mmc1 external card?

thanks - chriSvnh

Yes you can with canola maybe the mmc1 was missing on the option! Just go to

settings -> media lib -> media folders -> audio folders

click on both mmc1 and mmc2 then do a re-scan.

nhanquy: that worked...thanks...now my files on my mmc1 AND mmc2 are able to be accessed readily by canola.

however....i have not been able to figure out a similar way to do it on the n800's native media player.

right now i can open Media Player but my library is empty. i assume that this is because i am using a cloned OS on my internal sd card. i CAN go to the menu>Clip>Open and then manually go find the folder on my external card and play a song....but then if i want to play another i have to do it all again.

shouldnt...or isnt there a mechanism that media player will use to scan for media on my tablet? KAGU Player did it on install and then even went online and found the cover art etc.

i would just be happy to get media player to have my music, videos and pics available to me upon startup

Yes, that would be metalayer-crawler. Each time your tablet is booted, metalayer-crawler should scan the entire tablet--including the SD card--for media files and index any found for the Media Player. Additionally, each time you insert an SD card, metalayer-crawler should check and index media files on it.

Some users have reported cases where metalayer-crawler has become confused by malformed media files or unusual filesystem layouts. In these cases it can get stuck, just spinning its wheels, and never complete the indexing. A side effect of this happening is the battery life of the affected tablet will plummet, as metalayer-crawler is keeping the CPU busy with unproductive work.

Some folks who run into this problem disable metalayer-crawler on their tablets. The downside, of course, is media on their tablets is no longer indexed for Media Player's use.

You haven't disabled metalayer-crawler, have you?

sjgadsby: i didnt deliberately disable metalayer-crawler. i may have stated earlier that i used penguinbait's console tools to partion my 8gb internal and 16gb external. it was after this that i noticed that media player was not updating the library.

after reading what you wrote. i rebooted from flash...opened media player and it DID update and load the library from both of my mmc. this took about 2 - 2 1/2 minutes as i had 1015 music files in a folder i got from my daughter.

i then rebooted to the clone, opened media player but it did NOT update.

i did a search of ITT for metalayer-crawler and found a thread where someone told another person how to restart metalayer. i am just learning this stuf but i used roxterm and entered /etc/init.d/metalayer-crawler0 restart

sure enough it started to update the library but it was going so incredibly slow that i took turns inserting the term "stop" and "start" in place of "restart" and then i seized things up by opening maemopad to write this code snippet in (that is how i keep useful bits of code to teach myself this stuff)

i rebooted to clone, opened media player and did the restart thing for metalayer-crawler and it DID update the library but it took a loooong time.....like around 20 minutes.

everything worked fine in media player....so onto the next test.

i shut down then restarted in clone and again......no files and no library refresh in media player. i opened roxterm and ran the restart code and it seems to be refreshing the library as i type this. after 5 minutes...it is up to 240 of the 1015 songs.

so what next?

should i be glad that it isnt running in a loop and using battery up? or could it be?

is there a way i can get it back to scanning automatically? and what could be making it take so long compared to when i turn on media player in flash boot?

also...once it is done refreshing the library...does it shut itself off? or do i have to use a stop command for metalayer-crawler to be sure it isnt running in the background?

13 minutes and it has catalogued 624 songs.....a little less than 400 to go

okay...it JUST got done....and it took 20 minutes. any clue on the length of time? canola and kagu do the same thing in moments....as does media player if i boot from flash

*** a test, i have used a few apps.....used media player...closed media player....done a few more tasks with various apps......and used media player again. so i guess if i leave my tablet powered up, it will keep the songs in the library.

any input on how i can get it back to working normally? and is there a way i can make sure the process isnt using battery?

There is a known bug with metalayer-crawler right now. A fix has been made and I'd assume will be a part of the next SSU. You can see the bug report which has an installable .deb file which will fix the problem inlcuded: https://bugzilla.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3970

I will give you this warning though: Installing that file will cause the removal of a metapackage that may cause your system to not upgrade correctly or to fail to upgrade when the next SSU is available. In the past, this has occaisionally resulted in some people having to reflash their systems. It should be noted, however, that the package that is removed is not, itself essential for a working tablet, so theoretically, you should be able to install this update and not have to worry about it. I would just make sure to reinstall the package that gets uninstalled prior to doing any system upgrades.