Since 2 days I am an proud owner of a N900. The first day I've installed about 10-12 apps (some from the extras-devel repo).

After using the phone for a couple of hours I got the error message mentioned earlier. Because of this message I could not open new apps (this gave another error msg). Even after closing all the running apps I still kept getting this msg. The only solution was a reboot.

Today the same thing happened again (after a few hours of usage); but now I sometimes was able to open and use apps. My first thought was that it ran out of virtual mem. The output of the "free" command was about 700MB of free mem (all swap).

After reboot I tested by opening as much as apps. Mem usage went up to 450MB but still did not got any error msg.

Someone gave me the tip to look at the usage of the rootfs filesystem. Yesterday, rootfs was 76% full. So I uninstalled some apps to gain another 3%. After having the error msg again I uninstalled some more apps. Usage of rootfs is now 70%. All other filesystems/mounts have a usage percentage of max. 60% (most of them <10%).

What is causing this error message? Any clue? How to trace the cause? Log files? Where do I have to look?

Kind regards,

Murat
The Netherlands

It's because you installed applications from extras-devel probably. Since not all apps in there have been optifyed meaning they don't install to the 2 GB /opt director but to the root instead (which has limited space). But you did look at the rootfs system already and it does show some room... hmm

Welcome to the forum!

It's not really the issue you run into, but related: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5450 .
Also, Extras-Devel can be dangerous, as already mentioned.

If you manage to track down the root issue here I'm looking forward to a bug report about it. :-)

Yes, it did show some room. Today I've only installed one app "KMPlayer". But I didn't get this err msg immediately after install. It was like 10-30 mins after that.

I will try to do some more tracing when I get this msg again. Thanks for the help for now.

@Andre Klapper: Thank you for the warm welcome

version:N900-42-11

Dangerous how?

Also is it possible when downloading apps to save them to the correct repository and if so, what is the extension?

Untested. Can drain your battery, remove your data, create big problems. That's why it's called "testing" and "devel".
"Extras" itself should be safe for end-users because that software is... tested.

Also see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=343619 .

you dont save stuff to a repository on your device.
repositories are collections of software, most of the time categorized and hosted to download.
different repositories have different collections, for the same platform it is most likely that different base repositories have different versions of software from different steps of development.

developers use the testing repository to release a not yet stable and optimized version to other developers to have it tested. They know what they are doing (or think they know). If you are aware of the risk to brick your device you are free to go with extras-testing. you've been told! (was this to scary?)

I use debian testing myself and am aware that using it could mean to get stuck somewhere because of a fault in some piece of software, I had system freezes, constantly restarting xserver and so on. If you dont like to have a challenge like that stay away from testing and developer repositories.

I am getting this error as well, when trying to real emails in mail app (modest).

The top shows:
Mem: 149/239
Swp: 95/767

I don't think this is related to any filesystem space issues.

Are other people encountering this issue ?
Maybe it's some sort of mem limitation per process ?

I reckon you have systeminfowidget?
This app confirmed to have memory leak issue.

It was promoted a few days ago to extras-testing...

I don't have it and it can't be the cause of this.
If an app would leak memory I would see it in the top.
As my numbers show there is plenty of memory, it didn't enough swap seriously.

It looks to me either like a bug or a per app limitation.
I have just started a gazillion of apps and the mem usage shot upwards, still I didn't encounter the error.
It only happens in modest and for a certain email.