[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Re: Span filesystem across both SD cards?

[From: Marius Gedminas]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 06:29:22AM +0100, sebastian maemo wrote:
> When I bought N80 phone, I found a very useful and logic feature: when you
> install a new app, the application manager asks you whether you want it
> installed over your tiny phone memory, or over your large GB memory card.
> 
> For don't-know-what-reason Nokia failed to make this feature available on
> his 770. They just let me create a 64M swap file that helps, but not that
> much.

I would guess the reason is that it's not that simple to do this in
a Linux system.

I agree that it would be useful.  So would a thousand other features.

> So here I am, trying to make things work. I've learned how to create
> partitions with sfdisk (not so friendly as fdisk), format them with
> mkfs.ext2 (that was easy), and mount and unmount them at startup and
> shutdown via init.d scripts (that was the worst one).
> 
> And now that I've learned all that much, I created the wrong symlinks: I
> cp'ed /usr to the MMC, and then made the wrong link: ln -s /media/mmc2/usr
> /usr. Yes, now I know it should be the reverse way, but do not understand
> why.

No, your command is correct.  Other things might be wrong:

  - cp doesn't preserve file permissions, unless you ask for it
    explicitly.  You may have ended up with all the programs in /usr/bin
    not executable

  - If you did not remove the /usr directory before creating the
    symlink, you've ended up with a symlink /usr/usr -> /media/mmc2/usr
    This should not have prevented it from booting, though.

  - I do not know if /media/mmc2 is mounted early enough before the boot
    sequence needed to access files in /usr.

Marius Gedminas
-- 
"Linux was made by foreign terrorists to take money from true US companies
like Microsoft." -Some AOL'er.
"To this end we dedicate ourselves..." -Don
(From the sig of "Don" <don at cs.byu.edu>)
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/attachments/20070202/25a73a4e/attachment.pgp