ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Sam Segers <sam.sgrs@xxxxxxxxx>]

I also experience this problem (also +/-1GB of data). I used to copied
the tarball to the sdcard and unpacked it from adb cause I could not
get /sdcard to mount in the recovery until I found it I needed:
run_program("/sbin/mount","/ext/sdcard");
and not
run_program("/sbin/mount","/sdcard");
/ext/sdcard is in turn symlinked to /sdcard so it's the same for the
install script.
Don't know how this is with other phones that have internal and
external sdcards.
I think the data partition is usually better at handling small files
so unpacking to the /sdcard and copying it might be slow (but I see
you unpack to /data so never mind).

2013/7/2 Florian Will <florian.will@xxxxxxxxx>:
> [Resending because my earlier mail was probably rejected due to using a
> bad mail address]
>
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I know this is probably not a priority with the development currently
> mainly focused on getting features ready. And in the future, it might
> even be less important because devices will have more storage capacity.
> So I'm prepared for answers like "Nope, sorry!".
>
> But still, I'm currently testing Ubuntu Touch on my old smartphone, and
> the /data partition of that device is only 1gb. The default way of
> installing the root file system on /data fails with that device, because
> the extracted rootfs and the tarball don't fit within /data at the same
> time. I have posted a merge request for the tarball creation scripts [1]
> that fixes this problem by storing the .tar.gz on /sdcard, maybe this
> can be used as the default for future tarballs? It would definitely make
> life easier for anyone aiming to provide images for older devices with
> small /data.
>
>
> Another problem is that /data quickly reaches a point where it has
> almost no free space left when using the device (because of logs etc.).
> A few problems I've had were actually caused by this, like some
> networking tools (wpa_supplicant? network manager?) refusing to connect
> to wifi when df shows that there is less than 100mb storage capacity
> available on /data.
>
> I've looked through the rootfs.tar.gz and noticed a few "low-hanging
> fruits" for trimming down the size. There are probably more. Do you
> think it's worthwile to care about them? Or is it considered a very low
> priority, as long as it is okay on the officially supported devices?
>
> Examples that are probably free of negative side-effects:
>   * /var/log: 9mb lastlog and other logs that could be rm-ed before the
> tarball is created
>   * /etc/apt/sources.list: Disable the source package archive, so there
> are fewer big files in /var/lib/apt/lists (I don't think there are a lot
> of use-cases where this needs to be enabled, also speeds up apt-get
> updates I guess)
>   * /usr/share/icons: Not sure if the Humanity icons are needed at all
> (14mb). I guess the svg icons for Ubuntu Touch are required, otherwise
> they could be removed to save another 10mb.
>
> Example that has negative effects on performance:
>   * Disable binary apt caches and delete /var/cache/apt/*.bin as
> described in [2]. Performance for apt operations will suffer, but it
> reduces rootfs size by almost 50mb.
>
> Of course, after installing the rootfs, a whole lot of space can be
> reclaimed by uninstalling the demo-* packages. These are probably
> supposed to be included with the official rootfs though. :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Florian
>
> [1]
> https://code.launchpad.net/~florian-will/touch-preview-images/phablet-build-scripts-extract-from-sdcard/+merge/172300
> [2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReducingDiskFootprint#Disable_apt_caches
>
> --
> Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone
> Post to     : ubuntu-phone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone
> More help   : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp