Storage And Performance

[ptoki]

As far I know Netwalker has 4GB of flash and slot for SDHC card.
I dont count usb ports for pendrives.

First:
How do you deal with that amount of storage space?
How much does ubuntu fills in this 4GB?

Second:
How fast is access to SDHC card?

[merlin1]

That's correct. 4GB is made up of two 2GB chips but there's one big 4GB ubifs volume.
 
1) IIRC, the default install takes up ~1.3GB. I have installed a few apps including GIMP and Xfce and am using 1.4GB so far. df says 2.3GB is available. I only store applications on the flash, all my data is kept on a 16GB microSD card. I assume it is possible to have /home completely on the card [1]. I have decided not to do this because I don't always have the card inserted.

2)

Code: [Select]

$ sudo hdparm -Tt /dev/mmcblk0
/dev/mmcblk0:
 Timing cached reads: 248 MB in 2.01 seconds = 123.34 MB/s
 Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.13 seconds = 6.38 MB/swith a 16GB Transcend Class 2 card, when writing to the card I can get about 5 MB/s. Don't have any Class 6 cards to test, sorry.

[1] Copying everything from /home to a partition on the card, fixing permissions and then editing /etc/fstab to mount that partition as /home would theoretically work but this may interfere with udev.

[ptoki]

OK. Thank you for benchmarking.
After checking SDHC card prices it seems to be fairly cheap to manage storage in this manner.

I prefer to manage my data in similar way as you. I keep all my space consuming files on /mnt/somewhere.
In Zaurus this means cf or sd card.

[XE1UFO]

Hi. Thanks for the previous posts.

1. I also have a 16 Gb card on mine, which I don't plan to remove unless I can get a 32- or 64-Gb card. How can I add a Swap file on the card, (asuming this might speed up the system)? I tried to install Gpatred, but it would not work on this system. I would also not mind moving Home over to the card, if that were possible.

2. I notice there are still quite a few Japanese language files and fonts which I tried to remove, but it told me it would remove the desktop. I wanted to liberate a little more space.

3. On the left side of the machine is a full-size USB port. I have tried a normal USB mouse and an external USB hard drive. Worked fine. What is the smaller USB connector on the right side for? I tried connecting it via a mini USB to USB cable to my laptop for file transfer, but no go. I read somewhere that supposedly the Netwalker should show up as an external drive on the laptop. I tried with both WindowsXP and Linux Mint (Ubuntu variety) on my laptop.

4. My touch screen calllibration appears to be off. I have tried to recallibrate it five times. It always requires me to touch the stylus slighly below where I actually want to tick. Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for your input!

[merlin1]

1a. Adding a swapfile on the card:

Code: [Select]

sudo su
cd /media/disk
dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1M count=1024
mkswap swapfile
swapon swapfile
This will create a 1GB swap file, format and activate it. "free -m" will list the available swap space then. This will not persist after a reboot unless configured in /etc/fstab. If you want to specify a different size in megabytes, assimilate "count=XYZ" as desired; i.e. specifying "count=2048" will create a 2048 MB file. This won't work on FAT. As most cards ship with it, you have to reformat, I use ext3.

So far, with a 512MB swapfile, I haven't noticed any performance improvements when starting up individual applications as they fit in the RAM anyway. However, multitasking is much better now. I can have Firefox, Thunderbird, two instances of OpenOffice, The GIMP, DOSBox and a terminal open at a time and work comfortably.

dphys-swapfile (available in the repo) may also be helpful as it dynamically creates, resizes and activates a swap file as it sees fit. The default config needs to be modified but it looks quite handy.
 
1b. Moving /home over to the card is possible but I'd first make sure udev will not get in the way.

2. What exactly are you attempting to remove (package/file names)?

3. The mini USB connector is a full USB port, with host capability. In other words, it is just another USB port but you need an adaptor to use it (or find peripherals with a mini USB port, e.g. Sony offers a mouse that plugs right into it).

4. No idea, I don't use the touchscreen. I use the optical mouse replacement exclusively.

[ptoki]

Hi. Thanks for the previous posts.

1. I also have a 16 Gb card on mine, which I don't plan to remove unless I can get a 32- or 64-Gb card. How can I add a Swap file on the card, (asuming this might speed up the system)? I tried to install Gpatred, but it would not work on this system. I would also not mind moving Home over to the card, if that were possible.

What was wrong while using gparted? Does it install?
You can alvays use cfdisk its tex mode and needs root access but it never fails.
Divide card into 2 partitions. First for data second for swap.
Swap must be formatted using mkswap and second with mkfs.vfat. (I suggest vfat to ease windows interoperability but beware permission and limit problems.)
Its not recommended to move /home to card/. if your card goes bad you might have problems.
Ith better to link some files or directories into /home/user dir.

2. I notice there are still quite a few Japanese language files and fonts which I tried to remove, but it told me it would remove the desktop. I wanted to liberate a little more space.

Try to rename files which contain those fonts. After some time ypu cam move them or delete. You can do similar operation with lots of unused files (readme's, manuals, infos etc). But you need to know how those files are used.

3. On the left side of the machine is a full-size USB port. I have tried a normal USB mouse and an external USB hard drive. Worked fine. What is the smaller USB connector on the right side for? I tried connecting it via a mini USB to USB cable to my laptop for file transfer, but no go. I read somewhere that supposedly the Netwalker should show up as an external drive on the laptop. I tried with both WindowsXP and Linux Mint (Ubuntu variety) on my laptop.

It should work as usual byt you need a small plug which converts this mini usb into big usb. Normall cable with miniusb is "wrong direction"