Future Proof Mycroft Updates and Installs by Preallocating 8GB in the Image

[skeledrew]

This pertains to installing Mycroft via image on a memory card based system. As per convo with @KathyReid I observed that after writing the 20180301_build18 image to a 16GB mSD via Etcher, only 3.9GB is allocated to the main partition (this can be viewed with any partition manager). This is problematic because it is expected that Mycroft will eventually use ~8GB, and eventually a user may encounter difficult to debug issues when attempting to update, installing a skill, etc and there's no more space on the main partition, esp if they may know that they have at least a 8GB card installed.

This potential issue can be rectified in 2 ways. The first is for users to manually resize the partition themselves, but this may take a bit of know-how (it was pretty easy to do in KDE Partition Manager) and the user would have to be aware that this is the cause. The second method, which I propose, is to preallocate the 8GB within the image itself before distributing. As it now stands, the space used on the partition is ~3.04GB of that 3.9GB allocated. I think it's just a matter of installing Mycroft to a 8GB card, ensuring that the main partition fills it, and dding that partition - or the entire card - to create the image.

As a bonus, if it doesn't already, one of the things the support skill could collect is disk usage information, or maybe Mycroft could check if it has enough space to upgrade or install X...

[penrods]

I thought the image automatically expanded on first boot. I believe I used PiShrink, which is supposed to do this. Can you verify this?

[jaller94]

Yes, the main partition expands on the first boot.