Don’t ask me why, but the Palm Pre is limited to 64MB worth of apps. Install any more, and you get an out of memory error – even if you still have gigabytes of free memory.
Rod Whitby analyzed the OS and found the following:
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If you run “du -s /var/usr/palm/applications/*”, and add up all the numbers in the first column, then as soon as you hit the 62367 1K blocks limit of the addition of the sizes reported by that “du” command and the size of the app you with to install, you will get the dreaded “Sorry, Not Enough Memory” error from the Palm App Catalog application (and any other installer, like fileCoaster or PreLoad, which uses the palm appInstaller API). It doesn’t matter whether you have 192MB free in your /var partition, it will max out at just under 64MB of application usage.
Update #2: I have now created a Linux Application called “Fair Dinkum App Limit” (org.webosinternals.fairdinkum), which removes both the “hang” and the arbitrary application limit. You can find it in Preware. Just install it (no need to even run anything – if it is installed, it’s working), and you’re ready to install more applications than you can poke a stick at …
Fair Dinkum App Limit works by simply putting a couple of wrapper scripts in /usr/local/bin, which returns a size of zero when du is called, and returns the output of “ipkg -o /var list_installed” when “ipkg -o /var list” is called. In the future, the wrappers will be made much more sophisticated than they are right now to prevent operation outside of the specific cases where they need to fool LunaSysMgr, and to also include a safety buffer so that users do not fill the /var partition. This is a tactical response to a problem that people using homebrew applications are experiencing. Hopefully, Palm will provide the long term solution for limits on application installation in a release in the near future.
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Further information can be had on his blog, which sits at the URL below:
http://www.rwhitby.net/blog/webos-internals/palm-pre-app-install-limits.html
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The Pre can’t have “gigabytes” of applications installed, because the /var tree of the filesystem where the applications are installed is a 256 MB partition.
The reason it is 64mb limit instead of 256mb is probably as simple as making updates (new applications, etc) easier to test. If the partition is full, how does the update happen, etc. It’s probably a buffer zone, albeit a very large one