Low memory after fresh install of V3 and the touch screen plugin

Help and Support
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#1

Hi there!

First of all, I’m a Volumio user since years and I’m really satisfied with the program. So, many thanks to the developers for their efforts!

My hardware situation:
Pi3 + original power supply
8 GB SanDisk SD
HiFi Berry DAC plus
7" touch display
music library is stored on a separate server

I made the update from V2 to V3 a couple of months ago. Everything was fine so far…
Unfortunatly a power breakdown in our grid yesterday did some damage to my Volumio installation. It just won’t boot up any more. So I was forced to do a clean install with V3 (latest download here) from scratch…
The flashing job was done with Balena Etcher.

Everything went fine until the installation of the touch screen plugin. Right at the first boot after the installation of the plugin the message “FREESIZE is: 0.21” was displayed, but it booted into the programm.
After that I usually change the gui design from “modern” to “classic” or start indexing the music library. On both steps the display become blank white and Volumio becomes unresponsive…

Am I running out of memory on the SD?

The 1GB RAM of the Pi seems to be fine.

I found the boot partition automatically resized on the first boot to about 60MB (MSDOS, nearly full after the installation of the touch plugin) and the rest of my SD is split into two almost equal linux partitions.

Unfortunatly I’m not an linux pro, so I didn’t try to resize the partitions. I did some research on the net but couldn’t manage to find a proper solution for my issue. So I found myself here to ask the pro’s.

Any ideas from you? Would it make sense to extend the boot partition? May there be a bug on the autoconfiguration/autoresize at the first boot?

I’ve also read about overlays in the storage but I’m really not into that…

And if you ask… I did the same installation from scratch with a different SD card/other brand with the same size. Result was the same.

Thanks in advance and best regards
Andi

#2

did you wait about 10/15 minutes after boot, so the resizing could finish?
if not you better start over.

btw there are 3 partitions on your sd the boot partition will not resize
one of the linux partitions will.

and about the touch plugin use the latest 3.3.5 (beta) version

btw under Details you can find the other versions on the touch plugin page.

best regards,
dvo

#3

Hi dvo!
Thanks for your reply!
Yes, I waited for that timespan to give the resizing process enough time.
I used the plugin that can be found within the Volumio intallation in the plugins section.

best regards

#4

In order to check if the data partition has been properly expanded, please connect to Volumio via SSH, and post the output of

df -h

If there should not be an issue with disk space I suspect an error downloading one of the required software packages occured when the plugin was installed. In that case I suggest to uninstall the plugin and try to re-install.

I recommend to use version 3.3.5beta of the plugin. Unlike 3.3.1stable the beta version detects download errors and cancels the installation of the plugin if such an error occurs. In this case, the plugin would not appear in the list of installed plugins, giving the impression that the installation was successful.

In order to be able to install beta versions of plugins at first you need to enable “Plugins Test Mode” on http://volumio.local/dev; maybe you have to use the IP address of your Volumio system instead of “volumio.local”.

After that head over to the plugin store and click on the “Details” button for the Touch Display plugin and choose “Install v3.3.5(beta)”.

Be aware that updating the plugin from a beta version to a newer beta version of the same plugin is not possible in the proper sense, but requires to uninstall the older version and install the newer one. Uninstalling a plugin erases the settings you may have made on the plugin’s config page.

I also suspect, that it is not possible to update from the beta version of a plugin to a newer stable version, but I haven’t had a chance to try it out yet. So if you want to change to the stable branch of a plugin you would probably have to uninstall the beta version first.

#5

Hi guys!

Took me some time to get going.
I did a tryout with my second 8GB SD, since i went back to V2 on my main card until things are up and running again…
Strangely I got around 90 MB on the boot partition after the first boot. The message at bootup was “FREESIZE is: 0.31”.
Here’s the output from the df -h command before installing the touch display plugin (beta):

Volumio Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Welcome to Volumio for Raspberry Pi (5.10.92-v7+ armv7l)
Last login: Mon Mar 28 17:16:07 2022 from xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
volumio@volumio:~$ df -h
^[[3~Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2 2.5G 425M 1.9G 19% /imgpart
/dev/loop0 364M 364M 0 100% /static
overlay 4.9G 19M 4.6G 1% /
devtmpfs 445M 0 445M 0% /dev
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 484M 13M 471M 3% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups
tmpfs 20M 36K 20M 1% /var/log
tmpfs 484M 36K 484M 1% /tmp
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups/tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p1 92M 54M 38M 59% /boot
tmpfs 97M 0 97M 0% /run/user/1000

and here the output afterwards (FREESIZE is: 0.31 still appears):

Volumio Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Welcome to Volumio for Raspberry Pi (5.10.92-v7+ armv7l)
volumio@volumio:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2 2.5G 425M 1.9G 19% /imgpart
/dev/loop0 364M 364M 0 100% /static
overlay 4.9G 1.1G 3.6G 23% /
devtmpfs 445M 0 445M 0% /dev
tmpfs 484M 96M 388M 20% /dev/shm
tmpfs 484M 13M 471M 3% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 484M 1.7M 482M 1% /tmp
tmpfs 20M 216K 20M 2% /var/log
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups/tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p1 92M 54M 38M 59% /boot
tmpfs 97M 0 97M 0% /run/user/1000

then the change to classic UI (the screen went straight white):

Volumio Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.
Welcome to Volumio for Raspberry Pi (5.10.92-v7+ armv7l)
volumio@volumio:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p2 2.5G 425M 1.9G 19% /imgpart
/dev/loop0 364M 364M 0 100% /static
overlay 4.9G 1.1G 3.6G 23% /
devtmpfs 445M 0 445M 0% /dev
tmpfs 484M 8.6M 475M 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 484M 9.0M 475M 2% /run
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups
tmpfs 20M 44K 20M 1% /var/log
tmpfs 484M 1.6M 482M 1% /tmp
tmpfs 484M 0 484M 0% /var/spool/cups/tmp
/dev/mmcblk0p1 92M 54M 38M 59% /boot
tmpfs 97M 0 97M 0% /run/user/1000

So I switched back to the modern GUI (display came back to normal) and inserted my library. Suddenly after indexing my library if I change the GUI to classic, the screen semms like OK again.

Nuts… :slight_smile:
That’s strange!

Best regards

#6

No time for celebrations yet…
Right at the next boot the screen becomes white again and stays in that state (classic GUI).

Best regards

#7

Could it be you have the issue reported here (which has nothing to do with low memory or the Touch Display plugin)?

#8

Hi gvolt!

Well, it seems like you are right. Thank you for the tip!!!
Unfortunately, as I mentioned, I’m not a pro in this. The memory was my first suggestion because of the freesize message, never realized it before. So combined with the fresh install after the power breakdown I had no idea what to look else for since everything was perfect before…
Many thanks for your help and sorry for the lost time.

Best regards

#9

No problem. Hope you get it solved with the steps Wheaten provided in the linked thread.

#10

It was only happening in a previous beta release it should not occur with the current stable version.

#11

Hm, at least bcesary reported the issue for version 3.233 which is the current release version. PieterDV2 reported the same problem and was also on 3.233.

#12

then @DED should have a look here. They couldn’t reproduce it with the latest sable release. Me neither.

#13

problem should be fixed in later versions. i had update problems to needed a full re-install all to fix it.
i’m now on 3.248

#14

That was my understanding, too:

#15

So if I understand you right:
I must wait for an official update >3.233 which is not the case yet OR I could go for a beta release (guess the system offered me 3.249 yesterday), right?

By the way, and that is my last question ;-):
What does the message FREESIZE is … mean?

Thank you guys!

#16

If you can avoid switching back and forth between the UI themes, I would suggest to change the theme only once to the desired one and then wait for the next official release.

IIRC it is the amount of space available on the boot partition, but I may be wrong.

#17

If I recall correct, freesize is related to the memory, after it finished loading it’s OS stuff into the memory.
But Volumio should be better able to answer this one.