Wonderful as it is, the Nokia 770 does have limitations, storage being one of those that pinch you earliest. One thing you can do is add a larger RS-MMC card. That enables you to keep big files on your device, but you can’t put the really big ones into the MyDocs directory, and you can easily fill that up.

At the Maemo Wiki is a new page called “How to upgrade the internal memory by extending the root filesystem to a memory card” at maemo.org/maemowiki/ExtendedRootFilesystem.

I’m not pointing out anything new to those who saw reference to this at Planet Maemo in the blog recently added there, Wolfram Ravenwolf blog which is written by Stefan Daniel Schwarz.

He also pointed to the wiki page in a thread here at itT forums, with the same title.

In the wiki page, he describes how to repartition and reformat a (larger) RS-MMC card and then move files to a second partition. He suggests moving “the root and user home directories onto the memory card (/root and /home/user) as well as user data like bookmarks (/usr/share/osso-bookmarks), settings (/etc/bluetooth/name, /var/lib/gconf, and /etc/osso-af-init/locale), even installed programs (/var/lib/install),” depending on the size of your new partition.

Explaining that this has the memory card’s new partition mounted at /Root, he adds, “We can move anything in there, and it is swapped out of the internal memory and onto the memory card. We then create a symbolic link in the internal memory which points to the file located on the memory card. To the device, it looks like nothing has changed, but now you can store everything you want on the memory card….

“Specifically, this frees up internal memory, which you will see in the control panel.”

And all those files can be in MyDocs and its child folders, Documents, Images, Audio Clips and Video Clips.

In my own case, I ordered a 1 GB Kingston DV RS-MMC card last week (UPS says they’ll deliver tomorrow), and that will give me enough space to implement this. No more deciding which files I put on MMC and which ones in Documents for me. Now that I think about it, this should allow me to install more applications, including some of the ones I’ll use infrequently.

At the same time, I will likely create a swap file in this partition too, which people have reported makes their system run more stably and faster. The itT FAQ page on swap cites Andy Diller writing at The Synching Apple as the originator of this notion (the initial post there points to a comment in the Maemo Users list about enabling swap). A thread here at itT forums, “Swap space on RSMMC card?“, contains more material on this.

Addendum on buying a bigger MMC card — and a BT keyboard
I’ve gotten along fine for three months without a larger MMC card and without a Bluetooth keyboard. Why buy them now? Well, I wanted to stick some songs on the 770 for offline traveling and to try out some video, and that seemed to justify the big card. The keyboard I got hasn’t come into play much so far, confirming my first analysis that I could live without it. Having it for the one or two occasions a month when I’m entering a lot of material is probably not necessary, but my wife wants it for daily email entry — and her emails tend to be long — so we bought it.

So I was willing to pay another $150 (in my case) for these extras. Should they be built in and the price raised that much? That’s a question for another day.