Apologies for the following brief jump back in history and how it applies to us now. Some might find it of interest. Those of you who don't should skip this thread.

I knew something felt familiar about the current situation here. I was running

df -h | grep rootfs

in xterm and looking at the amount of memory I had left. Hmm. 40 meg, felt kind of close I would have to watch the programs I was adding. Didn't want to get too low!

Then I realized. Memory limitations! Back in the days of DOS and the early days of Windows I worked for a company called Quarterdeck. Our main claim to fame was a "memory manager" called QEMM. We made our money off memory limitations. QEMM was the number one selling (and pirated) utility in the US for lots of those years at Quarterdeck. Many companies were forced into either (1) buying QEMM or (2) not running their networks, because using their networks cut down the amount of "conventional memory" below the amount they needed to run their important applications. We had them over a barrel because we knew memory tricks that almost no one else did.

It got really good when we discovered a tricky way to get 64k of extra conventional memory that no one realized existed! Eventually Microsoft sent an engineer to one of our seminars and soon people were talking about how Microsoft had discovered the HMA (high memory area) and was able to get more memory for Windows users. This of course was our trick. So that advantage ended.

But one of our developers found a way, a really dangerous way that somehow worked, of using ANOTHER 64k area, the "page frame" to give our customers extra memory.

Then, finally, along came versions of Windows that basically did away with memory limitations, so that advantage we had disappeared. So we tried to run to Internet products. We were the first company to license the technology of a web browser called Mosaic to make our own web browser.

But we were slow to implement it, and in the meantime a company called Netscape emerged which was giving its web browser away for free! We didn't know how to cope when rich companies started giving products away for nothing that we had been trying to sell. So we went under.

End of history. So, when I was looking at how much rootfs memory I had left, I realized that the N900 had catapulted us back into the era of memory limitations. People were talking about tricks to get extra memory! And I thought that era was dead forever.

Actually, this was not the first time memory limitations occurred as an issue here on this site. The same thing happened with the pre-N900 tablets. But one day I was reading a message that boasted that there was a way to do away with all memory limitations, for practical purposes, anyway. If you played this one trick you could install as many programs you wanted and forget about memory issues.

This was booting from an MMC card. This did in fact solve the memory issues for the N800 that I had bought and the N810 that I later bought.

Now these same issues exist and apparently booting from an MMC, which I had assumed would again solve everything, isn't such a good solution. It involves some complexities and problems with memory speed that I don't currently understand. Sometime soon, we may be reading a message like the message I read that solved my memory issues on the N800 so I could forget about such problems.

Till then, we are back to the future, back to the era of little tricks of getting extra memory, thanks to the unique architecture of the N900. And back to worrying about memory with every new program we install.

WOW!

QEMM was a life saver for me many years ago.

Trying to free-up base memory for games and utlities was almost a dark art in the days of DOS!

My first PC was a "Compaq Portable Plus" running at 4.77mhz, with 640k memory and a whopping 10mb hardrive.

Then a "Compaq Portable II" with a 286 running at 8mhz, 1mb of memory (with expansion board) and an enormous 20Mb hardrive.
That's when I discovered QEMM & DESQview. A DOS-based computer that could multitask (the IPad & iPhone should take note!).

It would be years before Microsoft could attempt multitasking!

Quarterdeck were years ahead of anyone else at the time.
It's a shame the Microsoft juggernaught rolled you over.

I have fond memories of Quarterdeck
You guys were heroes!

Yes, DESQview was my real favorite. Even today, it would probably be blazingly, impressively fast. I remember fondly hitting the Alt-key to change windows, with a tap-tap. Even then, multitasking was a wonderful thing, as many stock brokers realized who needed DESQview to keep up with the latest moves. In those days, luckily for them, they were watching stocks (and real estate prices) go up and up.

Great post, thanks!