I recently bought an N810. Promptly filled up the root file system during a mad application installing frenzy. I realized then that my home folder was on the same disk as the root file system and had a bunch of media in it (including numerous translations of the user guide!), so I deleted those. Then I realized that the 2 GB internal storage is a seperate device, and I have to explicitly choose it for just about everything. Particularly concerning to me is that, when an application leaves cache, preferences, downloads, etc. it will dump that stuff in my home folder.

The natural solution, allowing me to do things properly (which is where I have my stuff in home, not on some arbitrary disk), would be what I have all my desktop systems set up as: Home folder in a different disk / partition, with rootfs mounting that drive as /home (or, alternately, creating a symlink for /home to wherever that disk is mounted).
Okay, looks like that should be relatively easy with the terminal (please tell me it's running a decent file system!), but I am still a tad concerned:

Why was this not done out of the box? Is there a particular risk involved?

Has anyone else done this?

I still new to the tablet scene, so I don't have a definite answer for you. But a quick glance at my n800 shows a pretty conventional looking /etc/fstab file. I can't say if editing the fstab is enough, maybe someone else knows.

I think you'll find that downloads from an app don't automatically go anywhere -- you get asked. As for apps themselves, you'll find they don't take up all that much room. Ultimately, you'll probably come to the idea of cloning your OS to an SD card. For that, see my signature, below. Alternatively, see Schmots' newbie centric howto OS2008 blog including step by step explained instructions on dual booting.

Thanks for the responses!
Yes, the apps are quite small (Debian is good at that...), but I hate having applications and user data on the same disk.

Okay, here is what I have done:

-Copied /home directory.

-First, I tried editing fstab. Changed mount point for internal card from /dev/mmc1 to /home. This seemed to fail, as /home did not appear when I rebooted. (Maemo did a pretty impressive job handling the failure, though; it went on with really trimmed down defaults in an impressively quiet manner). I wasn't expecting much; there seems to be some black magic somewhere which creates /dev/mmc2, which is visible to regular users, whereas /dev/mmc1 is only readable for root. Anyone know where that happens?

-Reverted those changes to fstab. I tried turning /home into a symlink to /media/mmc2/home. It worked, but the system did not like it; same sort of failure as before when I restarted. The symlink gets dereferenced, then everything collapses; some important applications are way too picky.

-In the end, I just symlinked /home/user/MyDocs, apps and Desktop to their counterparts in /media/mmc2/home. Then came a horrible realization that, for some reason, those folders with fancy icons in the built in file manager are imaginary and pointing to hidden files... and getting file managers to show hidden files seems to be really tricky on here. Created a bunch more symlinks for each of those, and all is well. Whatever it was being so picky about file paths must be in /home/user/.something... I'll just ignore it; if an application puts anything significant in a hidden directory in my home, it deserves to be uninstalled.


Come to think of it, this is a really roundabout way of solving the problem; I could probably change "user"'s home directory simply in the user's information. I think one source of my problems, though, is that the internal memory card has a horrible FAT file system. Does reformatting that to ext3 sound sane, or would it make upgrading by flashing horribly difficult?

Picklesworth, you know much more about Linux than I do, but I think you're complicating things unnecessarily. I save virtually no data in my home directory. Is the disadvantage to my approach that you have to go through more steps in a dialog box or type out longer paths in Xterm when accessing or saving files? Is there some other disadvantage? As for the longer path, I think there is some Linux-equivalent to shortcuts/aliases that can solve that, no?

Flashing, when you upgrade the OS, deletes everything in flash memory. As for whether formatting the internal card as ext 3 would make it difficult to flash, I don't think so (though maybe I should just keep my mouth shut on the question as I don't know what I'm talking about!)

All in all, I still think what you're going to come to is dual-booting and just saving files to data areas in your cards/internal memory. I really think you ought to try putting the OS on the MMC (not something I recommend for everyone, but I do for you). As I said, take a look at my guide on cloning the OS to the MMC.

Picklesworth, nice work. I think those folders in MyDocs for the file manager are config in gconf. I cannot remember properly though but I know I have seen them somewhere.

I'm working on something, if you don't see it at least in a few days, assume it failed as I couldn't compile

But I agree with GeraldKo, even though I'm being hypocritical by attempting to do the same thing at a bit more higher level

Thanks for that guide, Gerald. It could come in handy!
By making it difficult to flash with those changes, I am thinking about the files I am editing being replaced, and me thus having to fiddle with them constantly. Do you know if the flasher usually does anything to passwd or fstab?

Editing /etc/passwd worked out... at least for cleanly moving my home folder. When I log in there is still no theme and the cursor is visible, but all of my personal data is completely intact. (It even knows what theme I had selected; just won't apply it). I should poke in the logs, but I think it's a reasonable guess that I can blame the disk's formatting for this. Fstab mounts it with just about every filing feature imaginable turned off. When I have a computer nearby to help reformat, I will try again!

As for whether there is a point to this, there definitely was not much to my current working solution, where I have the MyDocs stuff in the other memory card but home still resides right on rootfs. By moving all of home, I am hoping to keep every bit of user-specific program data off of the root file system, which means major space saving measurable in, err, whole kilobytes! Also should mean no need to backup home when I flash the thing; just a few config files in /etc...

Symlink .icons in your home dir to /usr/share/user-icons