HAIL ruskie, i was searching for a solution like yours the whole last weekends... It's working fine, only the sed-commands are difficult to understand. maybe this should be included in an official update, because it solves all the rootdir-full problems. or even a possibility to allow other partition schemes for flashing would be nice, the hardcoded partitioning prevents using custom repositories, not only the maemo one. THANK YOU!

I added a more detailed description of the sed commands. As for an official update. The flasher only works on entire volumes so this would also need to be done in an init script so that it would then fix everything up. And it would also need to be coupled with a fresh emmc image I guess. So one could avoid the need for sfdisk. Or to be done on a rolling update still an init script but would also require an arbitrrarily large microsd to backup existing home and stuff so it could then move it back.

It is possible to edit only single partitions with sfdisk (-N1 for FAT32-partition or -N4 for new ext3/usr-partition).
So you can leave mmcblk0p2 and mmcblk0p3 as they are and you don't have to edit rcS-late...

One downside... you can't resize and add stuff inbetween. Space goes from one to the other... so if you reduce the 27GB to less you still lose space from what I know since there'll be a part in between not usable. Also rcS-late needs to be edited if you want to use fstab to mount anything. N900 by default rewrites fstab on each boot.

´cause in the actual times most people are used to have cards with 8 or 16 megs this should be possible if not to much data on other partitions.
Or do i missunderstand and it is not necessary to backup *all* data on card temporally?

But one thing is clear, if it would be possible to fix this boring issue without losing data... - then it would be one big step ahead...
So much software out there to make maemo-devices just a perfect little mobile pc - but useless if you cant install them due to restrictions of filling the root partition...

So I would really really like to see such an update

btw:
Is there any chance ("how to" perhaps) to clean root partition manually? in my N900 it´s filled by more than 90% and i dont´t like the thought not being able to install more apps. uninstalling apps doesn´t free the memory again? And the archive for apt still is linked to the home-dir...

If I were to keep a fat formatted sd card mounted on MyDocs, and have the entire eMMC as ext3, would the camera application work properly or not? Will the ext partition ever be affected by firmware updates or unbrickings?

Just a stupid thought:

Why not create a LVM over all available space and create custom partitions on LVM?

If the external card could be mounted on boot, this would result in a large root partition :-)

I guess LVM is not available but it should be possible to compile a kernel with LVM support.

Did anyone try that? Is it, in general, possible?

Cheers
Bjoern

I don't think it's stupid at all, in fact was toying with an idea like that.

However, it's not practical to include the SD card in the LVM, because:

you might wanna take it out and read on a PC, copy data to and fro...

what if you have to reflash etc., then essentially everything is lost, you have no safe haven.

In my mind the SD card should serve as a permanent storage for data, in case anything goes wrong with the main unit, you still have the stuff that's on the card...

Right, might be a stupid idea to include the external card, but a 32G LVM would finally solve all "No free space" issues :-)

I am rather new to Maemo and the n900 so I have to get way more familiar with Maemo to hack around in the Kernel (first of all I would like to make my own package to understand the packaging process, once done, I'll move on to the Kernel and stuff) :-)

But if anyone already did the LVM thing... let me know :-)

Cheers
Bjoern

Yeah, 32 Gig would be fine and then some.

I'm sure it's doable, but it's gonna require some work and no doubt a couple of reflashes, to get it working, so if you're up for that... Good luck.

Jebba => http://wiki.maemo.org/User:Jebba
compiled his custom kernel, which I'm using now, mostly for the coolness of having the framebuffer console enabled, so you see the Linux penguin on boot, am not sure if it has LVM support compiled in, but you can check it out...