Hi all,

When playing with the N900 (also with my N810) I strumble with the problem that after installing some programs the "device is full". The default behaviour of most application in Extra is to install in /local/bin or /local/sbin and also putting the libs there..

Unfortunately the / is only ~200MB, while /home seems to be the new home for applications (2GB)?

Who can tell me/us howto setup the application manager/dpkg to install in the /home instead of / (/default app dir)?

Many thanks in advance,
Joep

This is a packaging issue. You'll just have to wait for developers to get their stuff optified. If you want to see if you can hurry it along, feel free dropping offending maintainers an email.

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for your fast answer!
I think this will become a problem when the N900 goes into public sale. If there's no space available the device will lock forever if the customer does not have the right skills to fix things! (you can't even remove programs to make room, because there's no space to run the package manager :-) ).
Installing a few programs will be sufficient to get into this situation :-(

Anyway thank you, lets hope the best !

What the...
I really hope you are joking or this will be changed before the final release.
Why on earth would you install packages to /home (/force people to install packages to /home because there is no room in the correct location)?
Even making /home a separate partition sounds a bit strange to me on this device...

That said:
As dpkg --help will show you dpkg --root=/home should install packages relative to that directory. I wouldn't be too sure they'll still work then though (i.e. path to some things might be compiled into the binary).

duckyduck, let me guess: you have enabled the Fremantle extras-devel repository or perhaps also installed the last Fennec version from the Mozilla 3rd party repo. Meaning that you have gone beyond the safe path of the pre-installed Nokia Applications and Maemo Extras repositories.

If that is the case you are just suffering the consequences of it. Please find what are the applications you installed that dropped megabytes in your root partition instead of opt and MyDocs. File bugs against them at bugs.maemo.org and if they are in extras-testing give them thumbs down in the QA queue.

Anybody having an N900 today is a betatester, and this is how betatesters help fixing problems for the real users to come. Fixing a problem with a dirty hack in your local system doesn't help the Maemo 5 users and progbably doesn't even help yourself much (for instance, what happens when you need to make a software update?).

EDIT: also please share the list of apps you have installed before getting the memory full for easier detection of the most problematic and urgent cases. Thanks!

Hi Florob,

As Qgil mentioned it's my own "fault". I indeed enabled the devel packages, which are known to be pre-beta test versions of applications (and N900 clearly tells you're on your own and things can get broken).
I'll surely try to find some time to send bug reports, altough I think most of them will be fixed quite soon now many developers have access to real hardware :-)

Qgil, speaking about all this. Is there a place/wiki/page whatever where a description is posted on how to post bug reports etc?
I'll surely like to help find them, bus as there're also bugs in the Nokia provided SW I don't know what's the right place to report them. (concrete one: tracker went crazy, result: mediaplayer is telling me there're albums on the device (including covers) that I already deleted. Tried everything, including reboots and providing external power to trigger indexing. Finally removed all the cache/sqlite files, that worked for me lol.)
Having a simple place to report these will surely help people sending these reports.

Edit<Didn't read your post quite well, will check the URLs you mentioned>

Edit2< I think placing your installed applications out of the root fs is the best you can do. If you update the firmware of the phone (the root fs), you won't lose all your applications. Personally I hate the fact that Linux puts every application in one or two directories.>

Thanks!

My grudge was not that much about packages breaking the device, it was more about making /home a location to install applications (it never was and shouldn't be on any device IMHO).
/opt OTOH sounds sane to me, so never mind.

Most stuff in extras-devel is for the N800 and N810. Developers can select Fremantle additional to Diablo and Chinook when uploading stuff. Many people did so while uploading for Diablo and Chinook to see if their package passes the autobuilder for Fremantle. These applications were never meant to actually be run on the real device, and some will even fail, e.g. usbcontrol.

@Florob:
Yes, the place is /opt. Actually it's /home/opt on the /home partition with /opt being a link to /home/opt. Packages should install into /opt.
What I personally don't like it that the optification process scatters symlinks to the /opt stuff all across the / partition. But this is the only way to optify unrelocatable software.

Florob, I ACK that this may sound against all Linux standards, but I think it will help the acceptation of Linux.. The users are customers, not system administrators/Linux hackers...