Hey folks,

I installed the generic image for my TPLink 710N (v2) router, which has only 4MB flash ROM. I installed it because I want to have WIFI with Enterprise WPA, to be able to login to my university.

Unfortunately, when I remove the wpad-mini package and want to install the wpad package to enable the advanced wifi settings, the package manager tells me, that there is not enough space.

When I delete some USB packages, or anything else, I tried also the Luci package, and use SSH terminal, that doesn't also help much. Actually the free space sometimes even decreases after removing a package, with luci, which kind of confuses me.

Can anyone suggest me any packages which I could remove or tell me why this free space figure is so confusing?

thanks a lot

If you remove any packages pre-built into an image it doesn't free up space. I suggest you build a custom image for your device with image builder removing packages you don't want and adding packages you do want.

oh really? :-O
So I can only add and remove packages at runtime, but after reboot, they are all gone except the pre-built ones?
No way to write back the flash??

well, I wanted to circumvent setting up the whole build environment

No. He did not say that.

try the command "df" from console, and you see the disk partitions.

Flashed firmware is in /rom and you can not change that.
All the config changes, package installs, file edits etc. will get written to the /overlay that you normally see seamlessy on top of the /rom part (as one unified filesystem). That /overlay is the remaining free storage space on your flash.

That enables you to reset the router back to the flashed original etc., but the drawback is that the flash space consumed by stuff included in the original firmware can not be reutilised. If you delete a pre-installed package, it stays in flash and an additional deletion record gets written, so you actually consume a tiny bit more disk space...

Like stangri said, you can use the "imagebuilder" executable to cook a personal firmware from ready-compiled packages. There is no need to set quite the full build environment, but you need to at least download the imagebuilder to a Linux system.

(Last edited by hnyman on 21 Mar 2017, 22:20)

Thanks for giving right way!