My filesystems are read-write, and I\'m root! = ouch!

[padishah_emperor]

Am I the only one who is a little concerned that all the filesystems on pdaXrom are RW, plus I\'m running as root which is always a recipe for disaster (or accidental erasure of /bin)

Has anyone used a normal user accout, does everything still run ok?

I am also a little concerned that there is too much flash activity in the internal memory, I want the longest life possible for my Z, any ideas on that? I was thinking of moving temp files to my MMC card, are there any issues?  I\'d rather wear down replaceable memory than the precious internal memory, if that starts dying, my Z would become a paperweight.

I would really like to know if I can set mine up to be read-only, with the majority of read-write operations being done on external memory. Madness?

I know ScottYellich raised the question of flash wearing back in December, esp in regard to on-board compilation, if you\'re reading, I\'d like your opinion.

I remember hearing or reading that flash blocks are only good upto about 100,000 re-writes, that worries me.

Or am I being paranoid?

Also, I noticed pdaXrom crawls along and is much slower than X/Qt, is that right?  Instead of a second or two to open the wordprocessor as in Qtopia, it\'s now a 30 second wait for Abiword and xPDF is sooo slow I can\'t really get any practical use from it.  Would a swap disk help?

I want to install some apps to my 512MB CF card, no joy, it\'s FAT and I can\'t install apps to it, making it ext2 leads to a card running 10 TIMES slower! Using async makes no difference. If I connect to my PC as a USB drive, copying MP3/Ogg files takes longer to copy 1 file than it did a whole album before.

I must be doing something wrong.

Help!
:-)

[lardman]

I know ScottYellich raised the question of flash wearing back in December, esp in regard to on-board compilation, if you\'re reading, I\'d like your opinion.

I remember hearing or reading that flash blocks are only good upto about 100,000 re-writes, that worries me.

Or am I being paranoid?

Does anyone remember the (long) threads about this on the devnet? Is the devnet mirror usable these days?

The general consensus was that you shouldn\'t worry too much, by the time it fails you will be very old.


Si

[padishah_emperor]

Cheers Si,

My HP 200LX has lasted so long, must be the best part of a decade, I just want my Z to last that long too.

-Francis

[ikm]

Am I the only one who is a little concerned that all the filesystems on pdaXrom are RW, plus I\'m running as root which is always a recipe for disaster (or accidental erasure of /bin)

Has anyone used a normal user accout, does everything still run ok?

I am also a little concerned that there is too much flash activity in the internal memory, I want the longest life possible for my Z, any ideas on that? I was thinking of moving temp files to my MMC card, are there any issues?

The underlying jffs2 filesystem is well aware of the flash aging, so it is deliberately designed with the so called \'wear leveling\' idea in mind. The idea is to evenly balance write operations across all flash space. That is, each time you write the same file, it occupies different physical space on your flash. Now just multiply the given 100,000 by the number of the erasesize blocks (8192 on a 128M flash), and you get total number of writes before the death of the flash. So just relax, it will last for quite some time

Btw, you can mount your /tmp to reside entirely in your RAM memory to somewhat lower flash usage. You\'ll get an increase of memory usage proportional to the amount of data in our /tmp though.

On the root issue: that\'s just a PDA, a small and typically single user environment, so all these unix full blown permissions will most probably bother you instead of helping. After all, remember that most users on a full blown Windows computers are root too, and somehow they survive

[padishah_emperor]

Thanks for putting the flash issue to rest for me :-), I\'d been concerned over the last few days and hadn\'t found much information about it.


Another question:

What are other users doing with their storage cards?  Do most pdaXrom users keep the FAT filesystem or ..?   FAT seems the fastest but the least compatible for installing apps.

[Laze]

I use ext2 and then i have installed the ext2 for windows XP so i can read the card in my card reader under windows

[VladSu]

I use ext2 and then i have installed the ext2 for windows XP so i can read the card in my card reader under windows

What kind software/utility/driver are you using to mount ext2 on WinXP? It\'s free? Could you give the link?

[lenk]

http://www.partition-manager.com/n_ext2fs_main.htm

[ScottYelich]

my 512mb sd is crap.... so I just put mp3s there for when travelling.

I bought a 256mb sd and it seems to be rock solid.
under pdaXrom, I installed firefox, gimp (and other large apps?)
so when I flash from, say, 1.0.0 to 1.0.5 I can just ipkg-link mount /mnt/card, etc.

I also moved /usr/local to /home/local and made a symlink from /usr/local to point to
the new location.

I still have trouble with the package manager not updating the feed info file -- but
I know I can copy that file in manually,

With spare CF cards, I also put all my favorite apps for pdaXrom, etc.  I also
use another cf card to download the entire feed, so I can flash and test each app, etc.

Scott

[padishah_emperor]

What filesystem(s) do you use on your cards? Any speed issues for you?

[ScottYelich]

ext2, I believe.
the sd is slow... although I saw some posts about loopback mounts that would help combine small writes, etc.
I was getting very poor throughput -- there was another thread on this.  others claimed that they achieve near 1MB/sec.
I was mostly 30K/sec.

I don\'t play video, so I haven\'t noticed any real speed problems.   mp3s seem to load and play fine -- although there
was the occasional burp (I forget which rom, think it was old cacko x11 rom, not pdaXrom... mp3 fom SD).

Scott