Tag: hacks

Moving out apt metadata

As some of you may know, in the N900, the root file system is stored in a OneNAND chip with 256M of space. Meanwhile /home and /home/user/MyDocs are in a eMMC in two different partitions: ~2GB (ext2) for /home and ~29GB (vfat) for /home/user/MyDocs.

The OneNAND is faster than the eMMC, and it’s intended to host only the Maemo main system, moving out the third party applications to the eMMC. Though, this new layout has brought new limitations, the more visible one is the /opt problem [2].

One of the debates about what left and what not in the OneNAND is the apt’s database and metadata. Moving out the apt’s database out from the OneNAND to the eMMC, in my personal opinion, is very risky: It will slow down the database processing (which is already slow given the size of the Fremantle repositories), and if the eMMC gets corrupted, the base system wouldn’t be upgreadable either, because apt couldn’t read its database. And that’s why I’m against the proposal.

Nevertheless I’m aware that the apt’s metadata and database could be huge, consuming much of the precious OpenNAND storing space. Just to mention it,  I’ve found myself, in my development cycles, moving out those files.

That’s why I cooked this script: move-apt-dirs.sh

WARNING: this script is not official. You’re at your own if you run it: no promises, no guaranties.

async gio test

In order to understand how to use the asynchronous API of gio, I have cooked a small test. It was a little hard to figure out the use of the API, mostly because I could not find implementations using Google’s codesearch, neither doing grand-greps ™ on my jhbuild’s directory of checkouts.

I hope this little test be useful for those who are trying to use gio in their async operations.

summer hack

I have wrote a Rhythmbox plugin for playing mp3 streams from goear.com. It searchs, requests several pages on demand, fill the metadata when the stream begins and sorts the search results.

What is missing is the capability to make playlists with selected streams.

You can find the patch in Rhythmbox’s bugzilla. Just patch the code, add the goear.png in the puglins/goear directory, build et voila. The patch was done with the current subversion HEAD, but also is applied cleanly in the Hardy Ubuntu’s source package.

By the way, you can find a Hardy Ubuntu package for 32bits with the patch here (the metadata filling doesn’t work here :()