As more apps get added to both the official App Catalog and homebrew catalogs, more and more users are seeing a “Sorry, Not Enough Memory” error. This error occurs despite having sufficient free space on their Palm Pre, which of course leads to frustration. We touched on the topic last week article, “Palm’s App Catalog Experiencing Growing Pains“. Rod Whitby of webOS Internals did further investigation in an attempt to figure out users were having trouble.
I’ve now webOS Doctored my Pre in the name of science, and have tested the limits of installing applications.
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.
We suspect Palm will figure out a fix to resolve this issue. In the meantime, you can read Rod’s complete analysis of the situation at his blog.
UPDATE: Rod of webOSInternals has created an application titled Fair Dinkum that fixes the application memory issue. This app is available through Preware.
not true all you have to do is get preware app on your phone and that problem is no problem any more
@Joe1blue We noted that in the story. However, you cannot expect the average user to start installing Preware, etc. I’d suspect we’ll see a fix from Palm. Even with Fair Dinkum, the limit is set to around 250MB.
@Joe1blue:
In addition to what Christopher said, Preware (and other install homebrew apps) can’t access the merchant portion of the App Catalog, so you can’t get paid apps from there.