I've been using an N810 for a couple months. I simply installed all the apps I wanted and put them in the default place (internal memory). I put all my data on the removable memory. No problems running out of space.

Why are you concerned about needing to run apps from the external memory card? You are probably worried for no reason.

so you can install the apps on the internal 2gb card??? and roughly how big are apps? it's just to be honest i do get excited and il probably download a lot of apps, mainly games etc. but thanks for the info

You can't install on the internal 2GB by default. You can boot from the internal 2GB and then install apps on it if you follow the guide.

I would estimate that most applications are less than 10MB, some are less than 1MB. But you can find some games that are quite large. But also keep in mind that the 256MB is a compressed file system. That means that an app that takes 10MB for example might only take 5MB of the 256MB. Make sense? It's like the apps run out of a zip file.

Frank

ok i get it, now it makes sense... thanks

Is it true like it was in the past (n770, n800) that if you boot off the external memory card it helps the tablet to go faster.

If that's a question, then the answer is it can be faster. There are a couple of factors to consider. The internal file system is compressed so it takes CPU time to decompress. The speed of the SD card controller which if you are using a modified kernel may be clocked higher than default. Finally, the speed of the SD card itself.

Frank

16 gb card? it works?

official site says only 8 g card; i´m thinking of buying an 8gb microsdhc card, mi n810 will read it? or better get the 16 gb?

The highest capacity MicroSDHC card available at the time the N810 was released was 8 GB. Therefore, that's what Nokia tested and listed as supported.

The N810's expansion slot complies with SD/SDHC specifications. It accepts cards that follow those specifications, so long as they are physically sized as MiniSD/SDHC (or MicroSD/SDHC with an appropriate adapter).

Card capacity isn't a limiting factor. Buy as large as your wallet likes.

It seems to me there are lots of options for gaining storage space for applications:

Moving the whole OS off to one of the larger storage devices is just one option.

Moving user "data" (music, movies, pictures, documents) is another

Moving other data files is another.

Linux has a file system construct called "symbolic links". They are kind of like Windows "Shortcuts" except that they work, really.

Using symbolic links, you can move a single file or an entire directory over to one of the bigger storage devices then create a symbolic link to it in the original NAND storage device using the command:

ln -s <actual location of file> <"shortcut" link to file>

example:

ln -s /media/mmc2/osso_rss_feed_reader /home/user/.osso_rss_feed_reader

(the above should have been all on one line)

This allowed me to move my whole rss feed reader folder off to my internal 2-Gig N810 card and yet the feed reader still thinks it is in my "user" home directory that is in my NAND memory space.

I've done this with lots of "large" files and folder to free up space on my NAND root file system.

There are a couple of caveats however:

The symbolic link thing only works for Linux "native file systems" like what is on the NAND root file system space. It does not work on the FAT file systems you likely have on your SD cards (including the Nokia N810 internal 2-Gig SD). This means the symbolic links can only live on the root file system, not the FAT ones. They can refer to files on the FAT file systems as shown in the example I gave. Just be careful when moving a folder that might have symbolic links in them to a FAT file system as they will not copy and will stop working! For example, the /usr/bin directory has lots of symbolic links in them, so you shouldn't try to move it unless you first deal with this somehow. People have reformatted SD media to EXT3 or other Linux native file systems to get around this, I have not done so yet for the N810 however.

The other caveat is that you will loose some file attributes when moving something to a FAT file system. For example file ownership and permissions. Another example is file "execute" permission, but in this case the FAT volumes are mounted on the N810 to make all files executable so you can move executable files over there too. However to execute them, you either have to call them by their full path names or edit your "PATH" environment variable to add a new path search location.

I hope this helps. In my case I've moved all those hidden home-directory folders like "images, documents, videos, sounds, etc over to as lots of other individual files and folders that some applications create that were getting large. After all this I seemed to have plenty of space for apps on the root NAND file system.

LOL, probably like me. I only have 30MB of space free, but I had to install around 80 apps to get there. Almost all are under 3MB -- mostly little games & utilities. On the high end of storage requirements you have the Fennec browser (~30MB?) and the Battle of Wesnoth game (~60MB?).
Right now, I would argue that the simplest way to install apps to a memory card is using Easy Debian. Long-term, I expect it to be dual-booting to Mer.