[maemo-users] [maemo-users] Quick review of the Nokia 770

[From: Kimmo Hämäläinen]

On Wed, 2006-03-22 at 02:16, ext Lionel Dricot (aka Ploum) wrote:
...
> > > Why can't I have access to the MMC card when USB is plugged ?
> >
> > You (actually your PC) _has_ access to the MMC card, I thought that was
> > the whole point (apart from for flashing)
> 
> but why is concurrent access not possible?

It's not possible because of risk of corruption. When the MMC is used
from e.g. a Windows machine, Windows takes care of updating the FAT file
system structures. If 770 would also update them at the same time, it
would probably corrupt the card.

> > > Why can't I have access to the system memory ?
> >
> > As in RAM? or as in user-useable flash? I guess the latter uses a
> > filesystem type MsWindows does't know (if you use that, just guessing
> > here) - not that I tried, actually I'd just scp it over the net and
> > spare myself all the work of plugging
> > usb/mounting/copying/unmounting/unplugging :)
> 
> I'm using Ubuntu only ;-) Ispeak of course about the user flash.

I think there are several reasons:
1) Windows (and maybe most desktop Linuxes) would not understand the
file system (JFFS2).
2) Risk of corruption (flash would be used by 770 at the same time).
3) The MyDocs folder does not reside in a separate partition (because
JFFS2 benefits from larger partition), and I think only whole partitions
can be shared to PC. (If we would expose the whole partition, including
the system files, it would not look very pretty to the user.)

BR; Kimmo