What next after buying Jolla

A Jolla phone’s Sailfish OS is just like any other Linux distribution. Like you use KDE or Gnome or Mate et cetra in your Desktop, this uses Lipstick as its UI. So the underlying filesystem and everything else is the same as you know from your Desktop. To get a feel you can enable developer mode and ssh into the phone. How do we do this?

Settings -> System -> Developer Mode -> Click on Developer Mode

Now you will see a terminal in your apps screen. You can use that just like any other terminal and browse through your filesystem. It will be a little hard to type in the small screen. So we will now ssh into the phone. Connect your phone to the PC and when prompted select the Developer Mode in your phone. Now this will establish a ethernet over USB connection with the PC and there is an IP supplied by the phone. If not automatically connected, connected your PC system to the newly established ethernet connection.

By default the IP address of the phone will be 192.168.2.15 (you can check this in the Developer Mode settings). So fire up your terminal and ssh into your phone with username nemo. The password needs to be set too in the Developer Mode settings.

$ ssh nemo@192.168.2.15
nemo@192.168.2.15's password:
Last login: Thu Oct  2 20:59:31 2014 from 192.168.1.6
,---
| SailfishOS 1.0.8.19 (Tahkalampi) (armv7hl)
'---
[nemo@Jolla ~]$

This is your regular shell, and it supports most of the commands. It comes with screen and vi editor too (you can install emacs if you wish from Warehouse store).

Got around your phone? There are few things that needs to be done apart from installing the recommended apps. The media and galary have problems displaying content from your SD card. The problem is intermittent. To avoid this we can bind mount the music, pictures and videos folders to the folders in the home screen. The Video and Pictures folders are also needed to be mounted because camera currently doesn’t have the ability to switch storage areas. So its default is ~/Pictures for pictures and ~/Videos for videos. Create these directories in your SD card, or you can just bind your existing music and pictures folders.

$ mkdir /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Music # if you don't have any music folder already
$ mkdir /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Videos # if you don't have any videos folder already
$ mkdir /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Pictures # if you don't have any pictures folder already
$ devel-su # takes you to root
$ passwd # change password so you can use regular su
$ mount --bind /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Music /home/nemo/Music
$ mount --bind /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Pictures /home/nemo/Pictures
$ mount --bind /media/sdcard/sdcard1/Videos /home/nemo/Videos

If you were using android earlier and want to use the same folder to store your Pictures, you can bind the DCIM folder where the pictures used to get saved in android.

The next thing you will have to do, if you are willing to install beta apps, you should install the Warehouse app. The app can be downloaded from openrepos.net. After installation, you probably might get an error while installing applications from inside the warehouse app. This is because of an empty package remote specified by default. You can disable that. Go to your command line and then follow the steps.

$ ssu lr # you should see a repo names home
$ ssu dr home # disable it
$ pkcon refresh

After a reboot it should be fine installing packages. The next thing in line is to install patchmanager from warehouse. This will provide you with better options for your Jolla. Currently after a call is connected there is no haptic notification, and not media player controls in the lock screen. Patchmanager provides you with the options to enable these.

Happy hacking.