Cannot write into /dev [SOLVED]

[Apeman]

Hi

I installed VL-Lite on old very laptop (P233, 32MB RAM).
The system starts, I can logon and even run X, but there are multiple error messages during the startup procedure like those:

Code:

udevd-event[1771]: udev_node_mknod: mknod(/dev/pty/s174.udev-tmp, 020660, 3, 174) failed: No space left on device
udevd-event[1772]: udev_node_mknod: mknod(/dev/pty/s175.udev-tmp, 020660, 3, 175) failed: No space left on device
udevd-event[1773]: udev_node_mknod: mknod(/dev/vcc/0.udev-tmp, 020660, 7, 0) failed: No such file or directory

But I'm sure I'm not running out of disk space or Inodes. I cannot create directories or files in /dev, in other directories I can.
Here is output of df:

Code:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              5874424   2332192   3243828  42% /
tmpfs                    11980         0     11980   0% /dev/shm

mount

Code:

/dev/sda3 on / type ext2 (rw)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw,devmode=0666)

ls -l

Code:

drwxrwxrwx 17 root root  8900 2008-10-09 10:26 dev/

Does anyone have idea where could be a problem??

[newt]

I've seen problems with /tmp being mounted in ram (i.e. tmpfs), especially when the ram is limited.  Perhaps this is where you're running into problems.

Can you disable tmpfs, and reboot to see if the problems persist?  I believe you can simply comment the line in /etc/fstab pertaining to mounting /tmp as tmpfs, and then reboot.

I know in VL5.8 there were suggestions to not use tmpfs unless you had >192mb ram, and if I'm reading your 'df' correctly it's only showing ~119mb.

HTH!

[nightflier]

You say X works with 32 MB of RAM? Not bad. 

I agree with newtor, try without tmpfs.

[caitlyn]

I agree that tmpfs is running out of space.

I can confirm tha VL Light 5.9 works just fine in 32MB... with a Pentium 133MHz processor no less with the JWM desktop!  PekWM is even better.   OK, some of the apps are too slow to be useful (xmms and Opera immediately come to mind) but even AbiWord works OK.

We have some extra light applications in the repository (HV3 browser, SIAG Office, etc...) that are particularly well suited for your system.

[Apeman]

Thanks a lot newtor for your advice. It was very helpful. There was a problem with tmpfs as you said.
According to your advice I disabled tmpfs by commenting this line in 'fstab'

Code:

# tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0

but the problem persisted
so I changed this line in 'rc.udev' script

Code:

mount -n -o mode=0777 -t tmpfs tmpfs /dev

to

Code:

mount -n -o mode=0777 -t ramfs ramfs /dev

and all annoying error messages during the startup disappeared.
But I'm not sure if it's a good idea to mount '/dev' into RAM. Anyway it works for me.

Thanks caitlyn for your lightweight application suggestions. I'm really looking forward to try 'HV3 browser' and 'PekWM desktop'. But first I need to tune kernel a bit to get rid of unneeded drivers to save some system memory, this will be a piece of cake now :-)
A lack of memory seems to be the biggest speed killer due to steady HDD swapping in X. I'm gonna try CompCache. It could help a bit.

[Apeman]

I know in VL5.8 there were suggestions to not use tmpfs unless you had >192mb ram, and if I'm reading your 'df' correctly it's only showing ~119mb.

You'r damn right newtor.

The requirements have been even risen in VL5.9-Live
I found in 'rc.tmpfs'

Code:

# Requirement : RAM >= 256 MB
#                      SWAP >= 512 MB

The 'tmpfs' seems to be enabled by default in VL5.9-Lite. Many people must run Vl-Lite on computers with RAM < 256 MB. So there could be some question on enabling 'tmpfs' during the instalation like it was in VL5.8 or I missed it?

[Apeman]

You say X works with 32 MB of RAM? Not bad. 

The first task was to recompress 'tlz' packages on another computer, because some of the original VL5.9-Lite packages use huge dictionary because of better compression ratio. But bigger dictionary also means higher memory requirements for decompression and with 32MB RAM it means a really long instalation with a lot of swapping (without recompression of packages).
Of course VL5.9-Lite isn't dedicated for such an ancient HW. But with little tweaks it seems to work well :-)

[nightflier]

Thank You for the reports. Please keep us updated, as this could be a nice howto for running on low spec hardware.