Adding tools to PineTab without filling root partition

[brentashley]

I would like to get some tools on my PineTab - build-essential, git, midnight commander, pip3 install various things, jupyter etc.

One can remount the root partition as rw and then use apt to install things, and I've had success with that but it soon fills up the root partition which has less than 600MB free after a fresh install.  I'm not sure if there is a way I can target installations to go into the userdata partition.

Alternatively I could install things from source in my home directory, however of course I will need build-essential which will fill up my root partition.

What options do I have to make this work?

 - Brent -

[wd5gnr]

Expanding the partition would be the quickest way. Or flash Arch. The emmc is 64g but the stock image is 16g.

[brentashley]

Expanding the partition would be the quickest way. Or flash Arch. The emmc is 64g but the stock image is 16g.

It looks like this was "fixed" in the latest UBPorts update by creating the userdata partition to fill the space but leaving the root partition at its current size.  If I can expand into that partition rather than resizing the root partition, that would be my goal.

Not sure why the root partition is read-only and so small.  I'm assuming these were design decisions made with some reasoning behind them, so that makes me reticent to resize the partitions myself without understanding what I am breaking.  My preference would be to find out how to work within the parameters of the installation so I don't break compatibility with future updates.  I'd like to be able to share with others a way to make the current build extensible in a way that will work now and in the future.

[wd5gnr]

In theory, there's no reason you shouldn't be able to mount the drive using something like flash drive and repartition it as you like. I imagine they did this because eventually they expect you to run your stuff in a container like Libertine and then the entire drive image will live in the user partition. But that doesn't work so well yet.

It wouldn't be easy, but you could probably create a directory like ~/usr in the user area and then copy stuff over to it from the real /usr and bind mount it. That wouldn't totally solve your problem but I'd bet most of where you are running out of space is in /usr. Of course, if you ever lose that mount, you go back to the old versions of stuff which may cause havoc. I don't think I'd do that myself, but it is a possible answer that would not involve installing a new OS or repartitioning the drive.