How To Maintain Pdaxii13 Akita?

[walkman]

Hi,
so I managed to install the pdaXii13 and I found it to be pretty comfortable system. However, there are few issues I have which obviously have to do with me using the device in a wrong way:
- after fresh install df -h shows zero free space on /. However it is possible to move around and edit data in e.g. /etc/. The problem is, that I do not really know how much space I still have free.
- after a while (e.g. I am not installing things wildely!) I managed to finish the device already 3 times. It always ends up with "Unable to ... no space left on device". And that's it then. Nothing can be deleted with rm, nor can I mount devices (during reboot something fails and all mounts are over) to possibly fix stuff (copy a fresh new image from USB stick to SD card). Only a fresh reinstall helps.

Now all this points to some misunderstanding on my side. Questions/Issues:
1.- I have system installed in NAND (where else, right? I have C1000...). But I shouldn't fiddle too much with / partition. So what should I do instead? How much can I put additionally to / so that I won't brake it? Again, df shows complete non-sense.
2.- Probably I should install all the apps to SD card. On Meanie's pages I read that I should have then the SD card formatted in some strange way (two partitions etc.) It is not clear to me how to go on from this point. How will I ensure that nothing goes wrong on the main partition while using the device? If I install something to /mnt/card will it really end up there, or will some packages mess with /?
3.- Anything else what I should know about?

It boils down to a simple question: HOW TO USE pdaXii13 ON AKITA MACHINE? WHAT IS THE STANDARD MODUS OPERANDI?

Thanks for comments.

P.S.
Finally a small bug report to Meanie:
- wifi-radar in the Sally distro does not work out of the box because of missing python-threading package. It would be nice if that one was included directly in the image... BTW, it is also missing in your custom feed, si had to download it from elsewhere and manually add to the already downloaded feed you provide.

[walkman]

One more piece. Reading http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/pdaXii13/akita/ about using SD as the main memory, could you (Meanie, or somebody who understands) please explain the magic which goes on there with copying the data between the partitions.

As I understand it, hdimage-full.tgz contains simply a mirror of a fully installed disk. So I need to take it, unpack it to an SD card, mix my old installed configs/data from /etc and /home with the stuff on the disk and then somehow "activate" it. I guess "activation" is done by some configurations already present on the hdimage, just mixing it with the actual content of /etc is easier than copying it there manually (why?).

So theoretically, I could save a partition on my card and simply take a fresh card, unpack the hdimage to it (any other constraints here?) and finally add the correct stuff to /etc to "activate" the SD partition to be in a sense a system partition. Is there anything wrong in how I see it?

The last point, why do I need 600MB+? What about going with 512 MB card? BTW what happens then with my NAND? What will be still there and how it will be used?

[Meanie]

One more piece. Reading http://www.tyrannozaurus.com/feed/pdaXii13/akita/ about using SD as the main memory, could you (Meanie, or somebody who understands) please explain the magic which goes on there with copying the data between the partitions.

As I understand it, hdimage-full.tgz contains simply a mirror of a fully installed disk. So I need to take it, unpack it to an SD card, mix my old installed configs/data from /etc and /home with the stuff on the disk and then somehow "activate" it. I guess "activation" is done by some configurations already present on the hdimage, just mixing it with the actual content of /etc is easier than copying it there manually (why?).

So theoretically, I could save a partition on my card and simply take a fresh card, unpack the hdimage to it (any other constraints here?) and finally add the correct stuff to /etc to "activate" the SD partition to be in a sense a system partition. Is there anything wrong in how I see it?

The last point, why do I need 600MB+? What about going with 512 MB card? BTW what happens then with my NAND? What will be still there and how it will be used?

The hdimage was designed to be extracted to the internal MicroDrive and contains a full image of a installed disk with config set for the MicroDrive. The Sally release of pdaXii13 has some slightly different config than the Alice release and has the code required to run from the SD, thus you need to overwrite the code from the hdimage with that from the original Sally config. However, since the hdimage has more config files than the original Sally config, the procedure described is required to end up with an updated and combined config that has the additional Alice config but retains the Sally configs...
This said, the extended Sally system, ie the usual one that uses the MicroDrive, only uses the /usr part of the hdimage and continues to use the rest of the system as usual. The SD partition only pretends to be a MicroDrive so the functionality it mirrors is the /usr as well and nothing else. Also, the parition on the SD card has to be formatted as a linux filesystem (ext2/ext3) and not fat.

[Meanie]

Hi,
so I managed to install the pdaXii13 and I found it to be pretty comfortable system. However, there are few issues I have which obviously have to do with me using the device in a wrong way:
- after fresh install df -h shows zero free space on /. However it is possible to move around and edit data in e.g. /etc/. The problem is, that I do not really know how much space I still have free.
- after a while (e.g. I am not installing things wildely!) I managed to finish the device already 3 times. It always ends up with "Unable to ... no space left on device". And that's it then. Nothing can be deleted with rm, nor can I mount devices (during reboot something fails and all mounts are over) to possibly fix stuff (copy a fresh new image from USB stick to SD card). Only a fresh reinstall helps.

Now all this points to some misunderstanding on my side. Questions/Issues:
1.- I have system installed in NAND (where else, right? I have C1000...). But I shouldn't fiddle too much with / partition. So what should I do instead? How much can I put additionally to / so that I won't brake it? Again, df shows complete non-sense.
2.- Probably I should install all the apps to SD card. On Meanie's pages I read that I should have then the SD card formatted in some strange way (two partitions etc.) It is not clear to me how to go on from this point. How will I ensure that nothing goes wrong on the main partition while using the device? If I install something to /mnt/card will it really end up there, or will some packages mess with /?
3.- Anything else what I should know about?

It boils down to a simple question: HOW TO USE pdaXii13 ON AKITA MACHINE? WHAT IS THE STANDARD MODUS OPERANDI?

Thanks for comments.

P.S.
Finally a small bug report to Meanie:
- wifi-radar in the Sally distro does not work out of the box because of missing python-threading package. It would be nice if that one was included directly in the image... BTW, it is also missing in your custom feed, si had to download it from elsewhere and manually add to the already downloaded feed you provide.

actually, a default Sally install leaves much more free space. Did you resize your nand root to 121 during flash?

[walkman]

actually, a default Sally install leaves much more free space. Did you resize your nand root to 121 during flash?

Hm. After few experiments, I found that that was actually the point. As I guess many people are installing stuff according to your pages (especially newbies as I am), it might be worth to mention this step somewhere in FAQ. If things are left as they were after the factory install of Sharp ROM (or in my case install of U-Boot, then back to TriSoft ROM in order to get the Japanese boot loader and subsequently PdaXii13 ROM) only 58MB are allocated for the Xii13.

Anyway, thanks for support to a poor lame user ;-). I am learning. As usual, the hard way .