Other Nokia N900 GNU mobile phone tips

The Nokia N900 is the first full GNU mobile phone.

However it suffers from a very poor root file system partitioning scheme. It has root mounted with only 80 Megs free, other than that the internal disk has two partitions mounted, one ext3 of 2 Gigs, and one FAT (of all things, terrible) with 23 Gigs.

There is no way to repartition the device, as the partitions live on differet chips...

To get more root space, and especially more ext3 space, this is what you should do on a clean device (assuming your ext3 formatted MicroSD is mounted at /media/0):

• Enable Maemo extras repository: start Application manager > menu > Application catalogs > Maemo Extras > untick Disabled.
• Install rootsh from Application manager.

• $ mkdir /media/0/n900 $ cp -r ~/MyDocs /media/0/n900/ $ wget -c http://sumoudou.org/n900/fdisk

• # umount /home/user/MyDocs # cp -a /home /media/0/n900/ # ./fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

• In fdisk change the type of partition 1 to 83, to change it to ext3, save and exit fdisk.

• # mkfs.ext3 /dev/mmcblk0p1 # mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /home/user/MyDocs cd /home/ cp -r * /home/user/MyDocs

• Reboot. /dev/mmcblk0p1 will mount as /home, /dev/mmcblk0p2 will not mount.

• # ./fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

• In fdisk change the type of partition 2 to c, to change it to FAT. A fat partition is needed to be mounted in ~/MyDocs, otherwise Nokia N900's camera will not save pictures. Save the partition table and exit.

• # mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p2 mount -t vfat /dev/mmcblk0p2 /home/user/MyDocs mv -r /media/0/n900/MyDocs/* /home/user/MyDocs rm -r /media/0/n900

• Edit /etc/event.d/rcS-late as root and after the line:

/bin/mount /home || echo "Failed to mount /home partition."

add the following two lines:

/bin/mount /home/user/MyDocs<br>
   /bin/mount /dev/mmcblk1p1 /media/0 -t ext3 /
   -o rw,noatime,errors=continue,commit=1,data=writeback

• # mkdir -p /home/root/usr/share cd /usr/ for FILE in games include local src var do mv $FILE /home/root/usr/ ln -s /home/root/usr/$FILE /usr/ done mkdir -p /home/root/var/cache cd /var/cache/ for FILE in apt do mv $FILE /home/root/var/cache/ ln -s /home/root/var/cache/$FILE /var/cache/ done cd /usr/share/ for FILE in fonts icons locale mime nokia-maps pixmaps sounds themes tutorial-applet zoneinfo do mv $FILE /home/root/usr/share/ ln -s /home/root/usr/share/$FILE /usr/share/ done mkdir /home/root/usr/share/games ln -s /home/root/usr/share/games .

• Reboot.

The N900 will reboot and as a result of the above you will have:

• 111 Megs free in /
• /home with 23 Gigs free in ext3
• /home/user/MyDocs in FAT of 2 Gigs