[WIP] Sailfish OS Alpha

[peperjohnny]

Hello dear piners!
First of all a big thanks for Adam Pigg and Danct12 who made a lot of the initial work, without which this would not be possible.

I've been working on Sailfish OS the last couple of days and there is something somewhat presentable now. Be WARNED as this build has some issues:

Things that do not work:
Sound
Volume buttons
Browser (another one is included)
Plymouth boot splash
Attachable keyboard
Camera
Battery life is probably really bad

That being said it's quite usable for me already and since I'll be having a bit less time to work on it, someone might help a bit with that. Not all things have PRs for upstream currently. I'll hope to write them soon. There will be an image, that I took from my SD card for you at the end of this. The card is a 16gb one, so beware if you're using something smaller.

THIS A LENGTHY AND QUITE CUMBERSOME THING TO DO, BE WARNED THAT IT MAY BE BEST TO WAIT FOR A TIME UNTIL THINGS IMPROVE UPSTREAM. I'VE DONE ALL THE BUILD ON ARCH, SO STUFF MAY VARY FOR YOUR DISTRO.

Ok let's start.

1. Get the flash.it script from https://github.com/sailfish-on-dontbeevil/flash-it and flash a SD card with the pinetab image.
2. In the mean time get the kernel I patched for sfos from: https://github.com/peperjohnny/linux-pine64-sfos
3. You will need to build this kernel yourself, as the changes in porter upstream are missing as of today.

Code:

cd linux-pine64-sfos
export ARCH=arm64
export CROSS_COMPILE=aarch64-linux-gnu-
export LOCALVERSION=-sfos
make clean
make defconfig KBUILD_DEFCONFIG=config
make -j4 Image modules dtbs

4. Create a folder named linux_modules. Please note that you have to change the path

Code:

make modules_install INSTALL_MOD_PATH=path_to/linux_modules/

5. By this time the flashing of your sd card is hopefully done. Mount the boot and data partitions and copy the following files:
Image from arch/arm64/boot/Image to the root of the boot partition.
arch/arm64/boot/dts/allwinner/sun50i-a64-pinetab.dtb and arch/arm64/boot/dts/allwinner/sun50i-a64-pinetab.dts to the root of the boot partition.
Modules from ../linux_modules to /lib/modules on the data partition.
6. Now we need some firmware for Bluetooth and camera (Camera does not work currently)

Code:

git clone https://megous.com/git/linux-firmware
git clone https://github.com/pmsourcedump/ov5640

7. Copy the folder ov5640 to /lib/firmware on the data partition.
Copy the folder rtl_bt to /lib/firmware on the data partition.
8. Open the /var/lib/environment/compositor/droid-hal-device.conf with your favourite editor and change the last line to event1.
9. Create two files under /home/nemo/ .jolla-startupwizard-done and .jolla-startupwizard-usersession-done with owner nemo and group privileg. They need to be empty. We need those files because at this time, you will lack some packages which won't show you some icons.
10. Unmount the sd card and put it in your Pinetab. It make take a while but it should boot now. Please note there is no boot splash screen at the time of writing.
11. Once in the system connect to a wifi and go to developer tools to set a password. This will be your sudo or devel-su as it's called in sfos password.
12. Open the terminal app and install the missing icons with:

Code:

devel-su zypper install sailfish-content-graphics-default-z1.0

With the completed installation you can reboot the device once more and should have all the missing icons.

You should now be able to have a somewhat working Sailfish OS install

Now for those of you who aren't inclined to this monumental work I took an image from my sd card which should be usable too. http://peperjohnny.org/dl/sfos_alpha2.img.gz

I hope to upstream those things as soon as possible, but that may take some time unfortunately.