Introduction<\/b>
When I announced to the other Ubuntu Forums staff members I was getting an Eee PC and planning to stick with Xandros (as opposed to installing Ubuntu on it), one of the first pieces of advice I got was to remove unionfs<\/i> from the Eee to free up space. <\/p>\n
What’s the deal with unionfs<\/i> anyway?<\/b>
Just a quick primer on unionfs<\/i> (as well as I can understand it): one of the great features the Eee has is the ability to restore factory settings with the press of a couple of buttons at bootup (tap F9 quickly and then select the restore option from the menu). One person made a YouTube video of the process and clocked the restore at two minutes. I did the restore myself and it took about ten seconds (not kidding). <\/p>\n
This works because the Eee has two major hard drive partitions (and two random smaller partitions at the end—I don’t know what those are for). The first is mounted at boot as read-only and contains the factory settings. The second is mounted as read-write and is the user partition you modify after you start using the Eee. While having those two partitions makes restoring (in case you mess up something) easy and quick, it also sucks up a lot of hard drive space on a drive that is already pretty small (4 GB on the 701 version). <\/p>\n
My experience with unionfs<\/i> and reasons for removing it<\/b> Well, after a lot of tweaks, I did manage to mess up the Eee badly enough that I could<\/i> fix it by undoing all the tweaks, but I was glad to have the option to quickly restore it. And, more importantly—too cheap to buy an external DVD-ROM drive—I rolled up my sleeves and actually followed a tutorial on making a USB device into a live “CD.” It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. <\/p>\n So, with the ability to back up my installation (I used the dd<\/i> command to back up the entire Eee PC hard drive to a .img file on an external hard drive), I had fewer qualms about removing unionfs<\/i>. I also realized through regular use with unionfs<\/i> that a little less than 2 GB is not a lot to work with after you have applications installed. I don’t want to store my entire music and photo collections on the Eee, but I’d like to have some selection available there. <\/p>\n The removal process<\/b> If you’re planning to follow the instructions, here are a few things to keep in mind: <\/p>\n Conclusion<\/b> Introduction When I announced to the other Ubuntu Forums staff members I was getting an Eee PC and planning to stick with Xandros (as opposed to installing Ubuntu on it), one of the first pieces of advice I got was to remove unionfs from the Eee to free up space. What’s the deal with unionfs… Continue reading Should you keep unionfs on your Eee PC?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[909,349],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asus-eee-pc","tag-eee-pc","tag-unionfs","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.psychocats.net\/ubuntucat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Even though the advice I got turned out to be good advice, at first I was hesitant to remove unionfs<\/i> for two reasons: <\/p>\n\n
Emboldened by how much easier the make-a-USB-live-“CD” process was, I went ahead and tried the Removing UnionFS\/aufs tutorial on the EeeUser Wiki<\/a>, and the process could have been a lot smoother. I basically ended up following the instructions, messing everything up, and then having to restore my Xandros .img with dd<\/i> and then redo the instructions again. <\/p>\n\n
My advice to owners of any Eee PC that has a 4 GB hard drive or smaller is to find a way to back up and\/or restore your Xandros installation and then get rid of unionfs<\/i> as quickly as possible in order to reclaim hard drive space. The quick restore tool is fun and amazing, but it takes up too much space. I’m so glad I now have 1.8 GB of free space on my Eee instead of 400 MB.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"