help PLZ

[noobforhire]

i have installed yellow dog onto my play station 3 (80 gb model) and it says i have 6.1 gb of space to use is their any way i can increase this i know i have the space on the hardrive to do this

[ppietro]

i have installed yellow dog onto my play station 3 (80 gb model) and it says i have 6.1 gb of space to use is their any way i can increase this i know i have the space on the hardrive to do this

Oddly enough - no. When you partition the disc from the XMB in the PS3's GameOS, you only have these choices.

(assuming 80 gig drive)

10 Gigs for Linux (70 gig for PS3)
10 Gigs for PS3 (70 gig for Linux)
All for PS3 (none for Linux)

That's it - those are your choices.

Otherwise, your best bet is to add external USB storage - or really pare down your Linux installation.

Cheers,
Paul

[aguilarojo]

i have installed yellow dog onto my play station 3 (80 gb model) and it says i have 6.1 gb of space to use is their any way i can increase this i know i have the space on the hardrive to do this

As Paul (ppietro) recommended you can add storage to your system by adding an external storage device. As no one has explained the procedure to do this within YDL (or any standard Linux/Unix for that matter) I thought I'd fill in that task.

First you need to understand how to access or go into root or System Administrator (SA) mode and you need to know at least three tools to engage in the task successfully.

Concept: You should have two different passwords and user designations or identifications. When you are going to be in root for a prolonged period of time a specific password for doing these tasks is a good idea. When are are primarily going to remain in user mode for instance, you want to hear music, or do wordprocessing or use a spreadsheet within YDL, then the user name should have a password attached to it. When you need to be root for a short period of time, then it is best to use the sudo command; unlike the superuser or su command the password whidh sudo accepts is the user password. After a small amount of time sudo returns you back into user mode automatically.

For simplicity I'm avoiding bash and using ksh.

Advantages of using sudo (not sssuudio by Phil Collins) are discussed here:

http://us.fixstars.com/lists/yellowdog-general/March01/0392.html

1. root mode is signified by #. Being in root mode allows you to make all changes to your system. In this mode you can compile source and install or remove software, you can also change iptables thereby modifying your firewall or starting or shutting down various daemons or starting or killing various processes. Moving into root mode consists of invoking the superuser command and then entering that password uniquely recognized as the SA password. Note that you will not see your password. Here is an example moving from user mode to root mode:

$ su
Password:
#

When you are done using this mode merely type exit. Here's an example:

# exit
exit
$

2. The commands to be used in root mode are as varied as the tasks one can imagine executing. Here we will discuss the invocation of 3 commands:


• parted - this will show what YDL "sees" as available for it's use.
• mkfs.ext3 - this command will be used to format available partitions so that YDL can use them as an extended and available storage device.
• mount - this command will allow detailed manipulation of that partition storing and removing files from the extended storage device.
  

As I invoke parted note how it responds:

[aguila@arakus ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@arakus ~]# ksh
# parted
GNU Parted 1.8.1
Using /dev/hda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print

Model: FUJITSU MHT2080AH (ide)
Disk /dev/hda: 80.0GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: mac

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 0.51kB 32.8kB 32.3kB Apple
2 32.8kB 1081kB 1049kB hfs untitled boot
5 1081kB 106MB 105MB ext3 untitled
3 134MB 35.7GB 35.6GB hfs+ Apple_HFS_Untitled_2
4 35.7GB 40.0GB 4300MB hfs+ eDrive
6 40.0GB 77.9GB 37.9GB ext3 untitled
7 77.9GB 80.0GB 2089MB linux-swap swap swap

(parted) quit
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.

#

What parted (partition editor) is showing me are all the partitions it sees as well as the filesystem used in each partition. Parted can be used to erase or create a partition, however to create a filesystem (eg. ext3) one has to use mkfs or it's cousin mkfs.ext3.

Let's say you acquired a new external storage drive, your first step will be to use parted to create a partition and wipe out the information placed by the manufacturer or whomever. Next you will use mkfs.ext3 to create the ext3 filesystem which YDL will "see" copy and write to or erase from as you use that device as a YDL device.

An old article which I'm recommending here discusses the use of a program called fdisk; fdisk (format disk) used to be also known as pdisk (partition disk) but both are superceded by parted which is why I discussed parted, instead. So when you see fdisk, think parted instead.

As with any Unix/Linux program if there is a question regarding it's use refer to man, as in:

$man parted

or

#man parted

Here's that old article:

http://www.idevelopment.info/data/Unix/Linux/LINUX_PartitioningandFormattingSecondHardDrive_ext3.shtml

There are two more commands you need before you are done and you can use your external drive. They are mount and mkdir. First use mkdir:

#mkdir /mnt/hogwarts

This command adds hogwarts as a directory. It is always a solid idea to have a directory dedicated to hold or be a "place" (recognized within the YDL file directory structure) for your external storage device to mount into. Ok, so the partition has been created on the new drive, and the ext3 filesystem now exists on it. Let's imagine that parted sees that the new drive lives at /dev/hda8. Now parted can "see" the new external drive. Please note that all the other window managers also need to have all these preliminary steps completed before they see the external drive also. How do we mount the external drive now so that e17 sees it?

We now can do:

#mount -text3 /dev/hda8 /mnt/hogwarts

Then your external drive will be mounted within e17.

One more point, modern incarnations of YDL have not required any modification of fstab; however even if that step is not necessary, it is a good one to know and copied into one's personal Linux/Unix notes. The reason modern versions of YDL (or any Linux/Unix) would not need a direct modification of the fstab file is because once the file system exists mounting is almost always automatic, at least this is so with other desktops included within YDL 6.2.

Addendum: During recent work where I was asked to recover a drive I noticed that drives using the USB port are mapped to the /dev/sda directory tree. I noticed also that various persons had been wondering why they couldn't see their USB drives and thought that sharing what I observed here would be useful.

For the sake of addressing this question of USB drives fully I've connected a Sandisk Cruzer to illustrate what I discussed earlier. Keep in mind the different desktop environments provided within YDL act differently in how external drives are seen and mounted to the desktop, there's not enough space or time to discuss those differences. Here I'll be discussing what is to be done within the e17 environment.

In Desktop 0,0, the first virtual desktop, when you login to e17 you should see a window already open to your home tree or where all your user based activity will stem from. Look for the Places menu and select Computer, in shorthand: Places --> Computer. You'll see the image of the USB drive to mount it double-click upon that image. Then it will appear on the e17 desktop; e17 will also open a new window to the files it sees on that USB drive. You'll also notice within the Computer window something called Filesystem, once the USB is mounted you'll notice that the same drive appears within /media directory as well. I'm going to avoid exploring why that happens within e17.

Understand that what parted sees depends on where it is looking so if you just run parted it will look only at the system it has looked at before namely the /dev/hda tree. I already demonstrated what that looked like above. However, as we want to look at the newly mounted USB drive from within parted here is what I did:

[aguila@arakus ~]$ su -
Password:
[root@arakus ~]# parted /media
Error: Error opening /media: Invalid argument
Retry/Cancel? c
[root@arakus ~]# parted /dev/sda
GNU Parted 1.8.1
Using /dev/sda
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print

Model: SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 2046MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 32.3kB 2046MB 2046MB primary fat32 boot

(parted) q
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.

[root@arakus ~]#

Explanation:
The use of "su -" allows access to parted, and any other command, regardless wherever in the system it is located. If we tried to just use sudo or su, and we were not in the exact directory where parted (or other command) is located we could not otherwise invoke it.

I used parted to explore /media because I wanted to determine that a difference exists in how parted views disks from e17. I'm not exploring why this is so; I was just curious to determine that such was the case. So this demonstrates that USB drives are mounted to /dev/sda and that parted can see they are found exactly.
Of course from there one can write to the drive and do other manipulations one needs to do.

[ppietro]

Also - if you prefer to use a GUI partition tool, we have a community version of gparted that works pretty well. You'll need to add the ps3bodega repo and temporarily disable fedora-extras to install it with yum. There's something wrong with the version of gparted in the fedora-extras repo.

Otherwise, just manually install the RPM directly by downloading it from ps3bodega. I don't think it requires any other dependencies that aren't already installed by default with YDL.

Instructions for ps3 bodega here:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=5103&p=28382&hilit=gparted#p28382

The gparted RPM itself is here:
http://pleasantfiction.ipower.com/ps3li ... 3.3-3.html

Cheers,
Paul

[noobforhire]

thankyou