Hello maemomians.

I would like to set up my N900 as my home server. This is to serve a web page or two (wordpress) and to host my personal instance of owncloud.

As far as I understand, I need to install a LAMP stack.

I wish to use Debian wheezy as it is available as an easy debian chroot and it is on long term support from debian.

So I have downloaded Sulu's wheezy image and am able to fire it up. Step 1, easy done. Now I need to install some stuff like apache and PHP etc. except whenever I try to install anything via apt-get I am returned the error:

'You don't have enough free space in /var/cache/apt/archives/'

This is complete bollocks.

I thought the chroot filesystem image was 'self growing'?

What do I need to do to sort this so I can start installing Apache and other junk?

If you're going to use it as a server, why not boot native Debian instead?

I don't know how to sort your particular problem, though as I understand it that folder is where apt stores local copies of stuff... which isn't by itself very helpful...

I presume you've done the basic stuff, like running df to see what sizes various partitions are limited to inside the chroot itself (maybe /var is limited to a fixed size?), ls'ing and du'ing inside the /var/cache/apt/archives folder to see how much data that folder has by itself, and if there's anything which looks like it might be worth deleting, etc? (On my actual standard Debian Wheezy laptop install, that folder has 1.6GiB of .deb files, hardly necessary to keep lying around.)

So presuming you've done all that, my next guess would be to figure out where and how the 'self growing' chroot filesystem is hosted on the N900's filesystem. I've never done the whole Easy Debian thing, so I may be completely wrong here, but if the chroot filesystem is stored in one big file which itself resides in top of the MyDocs partition, and if that partition is still formatted the way it is by default (with that lame Microsoft filesystem which can only hold files 4GiB in size or smaller), then maybe you're running into that 4GiB limit?

That's all I got. Probably not very helpful though...

P.S. Off topic but I recommend lighttpd (or nginx) as the web server instead of Apache - they're more light-weight webservers, so might be more preferable on an N900... though of course for your use case it may not matter. For lighttpd specifically, I have experience setting up PHP to be invoked by lighttpd through FCGI, and that was painless enough. (I suspect OwnCloud or Wordpress should work on top of any web server, unless they're tightly coupled to some specific Apache functionality, though admittedly you might find more tutorials/support for setting them up on top of Apache.)

The Easy Debian image is not self-growing. It has a fixed size of 2GB, which is the maximum of what you can get when running it from your vfat-formatted MyDocs partition.

The best way to free some space is to run apt-get clean once in a while, which will delete all the files in /var/cache/apt/archives.

If you need more than the 2GB of the image you either have to move all it's contents to a bigger image or get rid of the image altogether by copying it to a folder on your N900.
Either way you'll need another file system than vfat (or ntfs) for that. I'd suggest to use an ext2/3/4 -formatted µSD card.

btw: For Squeeze only Debians x86 variants get long-term support [1] and I haven't heard that it would be any different for Wheezy. So while armel/hf might still profit from this as usually the packages for all architectures are updated, it technically has no LTS support.


@wicket:
I haven't investigated yet but in DebiaN900 my wifi dies after some days (probably a week) of uptime. and I can't bring it back without a reboot. I believe it's not related to the transfer volume as most of the time the device is just idling on my desk.
Just mentioning as it might be relevant for server-tasks.


[1] https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Using

vfat file size limt is 2 GB? Really? FAT16 has that limit, but not FAT32, right?
I have activated my spare device months ago by reflashing and cloning my no-telephony N900. I also do not remember having done anything on my first device regarding file system of MyDocs.
And I successfully copied my .maps file of size 4GB.

So easiest would be to truncate it to a bigger size...

You're right, 2GB is the maximum volume size (which implicitly limits the file size) for FAT16 with 32k clusters, but the file size can be 4GB (-1 Byte). I think I mixed that up.
So using a bigger image on the MyDocs partition would be possible.

Wasn't the vfat limit 4GB, actually? I remember having 3GB image files happily on MyDocs, until I switched to partition-based ED, and directory-based, later on.

Anyway, I agree that native debian would be better solution for server, if the wifi-dying thing doesn't kick in.

/Estel

Yep, very important addition (took me several tries )!

I'd generally recommend wired networking over Wi-Fi for a server. There is USB networking which does actually work with my latest install script (just not out of the box yet). Just disable ConnMan and restart networking to get it working.

[OFFTOPIC]
Thanks for mentioning the Wi-Fi problem. I'll have to look into it although I won't be able to test this sort of thing for a while as I still don't have a spare N900 for development.

P.S. Sorry for neglecting the DebiaN900 thread. I've not had a lot of time for it lately but I hope to get back to it soon.
[/OFFTOPIC]

I have just read the debian installation thread by wicket. This seems EXACTLY like what I want. This coupled with the fact I do not care about PA modules, SGX drivers and softFP steers me even closer.

Just one question. Does debian on n900 support USB host? The reason I ask Is I want to use a USB ethernet adapter? I do not really want to be serving web pages over wifi.