AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Installing Ubuntu Touch on the FLX1

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Recently, I came in possession of a Furi FLX1 Phone. It is really cool in many ways, and yet, still has a ways to go to be a useful phone, in my opinion. One of the things I was able to do with it though, was load Ubuntu Touch. Ubuntu Touch is much further along in terms of being a useful phone, but it doesn’t have nearly as many apps or features as the FuriOS.

A user named Jason on Telegram (https://t.me/ubports_porting/217354) gave me these instructions for how to do it:
Yes pretty painless, but I found a workaround as it wasn't working as intended>
1. In Branchy select> Bootman gui> ubports
2. Let it download and install
3. Wait for Successful...
4. Click OK
5. In Bootman
6. Name> Ubuntu Touch 2nd Local Partition
7. Size:> 20.00 GiB
8. Select Download Icon
9. Select 2nd option> Ubuntu Touch
10. Reboot
11. In Boot Manager> Select Rootfs
12. After start
13. Bootman
14. Select Download icon to install the software
15. Wait for> Successfully installed Ubuntu Touch!
16. Reboot
17. Select 2nd option> Ubuntu Touch 2nd Local Partition
18. Setup Ubuntu Touch
Unfortunately, I was so unfamiliar with what he was talking about, so after some trial and error and questions, I have created this new set of instructions to help the next guy:
1. on the FLX1, open the terminal (or ssh to it from your computer)
2. sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
3. sudo apt install furios-app-branchy (This installs the branchy app on the phone screen.)
4. In the branchy app, type bootman in the search to save you from scrolling. Select> Bootman gui> ubports
5. Click apply, and let it download and install
6. Wait for Successful...
7. Click OK
8. open the terminal (or ssh to it from your computer)
9. sudo apt install furios-app-bootman (This installs the bootman app on the phone screen.)
10. Open bootman app and click the + icon to add a boot option.
11. Suggested settings:
-Name> Ubuntu Touch 2nd Local Partition
-Size:> 20.00 GiB
-You can choose where to install it, internal or external, I chose internal.
-Select Download Icon
12. It will say the download is qued. Now you need to reboot the phone, it will not install until you reboot.
13. You will see the new boot manager, choose rootfs for now.
14. When you log into your normal FLX1 furios, open the bootman app.
15. Select the download button next to the Ubuntu Touch 2nd Local Partition. It will give you a drop down, select Ubuntu Touch (the alternative is another Furios).
16. It will show a pop up with a progress bar as it downloads the 3.5GB file. Wait for it to complete.
17. Now it will start installing that file, and then will prompt you several times for your Furios pin/password because it is running various commands as sudo. Enter your password/pin and let it complete. Eventually, it will say it was sucessful.
18. Reboot the phone.
19. On the bootman screen, select the Ubuntu Touch boot partition.
20. Setup and enjoy Ubuntu Touch!
Jason was right, it is pretty painless, as long as you understand the instructions!

Linux – keep it simple.

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Startup hangs on “systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service”

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My last update on Ubuntu didn’t go very well. After the typical sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y, the system downloaded and installed the usual assortment of packages. When it was done, it required a reboot to finish the installation, because of the updated kernel. So, I clicked the “restart now” button.

The system shutdown, rebooted, and then went to the splash screen, like normal. Except, it stayed there a LOOOOOOONG time. After about 15 minutes, I decided to do something else and come back to it. After 30 minutes, it was still spinning the little ubuntu logo, and had not left the start splash screen. At this point, there is not much you can do, I tried a few things, to no avail, and eventually rebooted the computer.

At the GRUB boot loader, I chose to start the new kernel in recovery mode, so I could watch everything as it came up. That’s when I saw the job that was hanging up the whole process:

systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service

This job just get going, and going, and going. Some reading online states that this is either caused by wrong permissions of files in the /tmp folder, or issues with snap applications. In either event, while in recovery, I cleared out the tmp folder with:
$ sudo rm -rf /tmp/*
A quick reboot, and startup was as fast as usual. I did run into a little problem with the snap application I had installed, but in my case it was only firefox, to which I just ran:
$ sudo snap refresh
Which refreshes all the snaps to their latest version and seemed to fix my problem, and affirmed my love/hate relationship with snaps.

Linux – keep it simple.

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Convert your Firefox passwords to PASS for UTPass

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Recently I switched to Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver for a phone. Whenever you change phone operating systems, there is a steep learning curve and an extended process of moving your digital life. If you use Android and Google, moving to another Android Google phone is fairly simple, or the same between iPhone devices. But if you switch from Android to iPhone, or iPhone to Android, or anything else to Ubuntu Touch, you have to manually move a lot of parts of your digital life. One thing that has been helpful, though, is that I run my own Nextcloud for phone backup, calendar, and contacts, so that was really easy with UT, as it has Nextcloud integration more or less built in. I could add one account in the system, and then allow other apps to access that account. Very handy.

One of the main app related problems with UT, at least for me, is the underwhelming browser. Don’t get me wrong, it browses the internet great. But doesn’t seem to have password storage integration, or various other features. In particular, I can’t remember the passwords for my 1800 (okay, maybe 120) websites that I have to go to for work, play, business, and life. So, I would use Firefox to save those passwords to my computer. Morph, UT’s web browser, doesn’t seem to have that function for some reason. E.g., I logged into a website, it doesn’t prompt me to save the password. I log out, and when I try to log back into that same website, it doesn’t auto-fill with any username or password, it doesn’t prompt me for one, it just sits, blank, at the login prompt. This is a real problem, and I don’t know how everyone else uses it without this feature.

My temporary work around is to use an app called UTPass, an app that is compatible with pass for password management. While it is not integrated into the Morph browser, it at least allows me to look up and copy my username and password so I can paste them into the login fields.

So the first thing that I thought I needed to do was to export my Firefox passwords. Turns out that I didn’t have to do that at all to reach my end goal. Keeping in mind that my end goal is to use UTPass, I needed the passwords to be encrypted with pass before I could export them to use with UTPass. So the first thing I really needed to do was install pass on my computer.

$ sudo apt-get install pass

Then I needed to set up a GPG key to use with it, with which I followed the prompts and named “aklu_pass”:

$ gpg –full-generate-key

And then initialize pass with that key:

$ pass init “aklu_pass”

Now that I have pass initialized, I could copy the Firefox passwords into it. The easiest way I found to do that was with a python tool called Firefox Decrypt. https://github.com/Unode/firefox_decrypt/#readme

It is fairly straight forward, you run the script and give it the directory of your profile.ini file for Firefox, and choose the output format, in this case – pass.

$ python3 ./firefox_decrypt.py /home/alaskalinuxuser/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/ –format pass

This python script pulls all of your passwords out of Firefox and dumps them into pass. You can check them by:

$ pass

Which should return a tree like output of all your websites. You can then zip up you .password-store folder with:

$ zip -r ./pass.zip /home/alaskalinuxuser/.password-store

To create the zip file you will need for UTPass. You will also need to export your GPG key so you can decrypt them in UTPass, which I did like this, obviously replacing KEYNUMBER with the actual key number:

$ gpg –export KEYNUMBER > public-key.asc
$ gpg –export-secret-keys KEYNUMBER > private-key.asc

Now you have three files, public-key.asc, private-key.asc, and pass.zip. These three files need to be copied to your UT [...]

phone, which you can use whatever method you prefer, but an easy one is the good old USB cable, but SSH/SCP is another good option.

Once you have the three files on your phone, in my case, in the Downloads folder, open up UTPass, and import both keys, and then import the pass.zip file through the UTPass settings option. And now you can view all of your passwords. You will need to type the encryption password each time to use this, so hopefully you picked something easy to type….

Linux – keep it simple.

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating a gem to an emerald for Ubuntu Touch

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After switching to Ubuntu Touch on my phone for a daily driver, I realized that there was no app in the open-store (open-store.io) for UT that allowed you to surf/browse the gemini protocol. I’ve talked about gemini space and gemini blogs (called gemlogs) here before, so feel free to search among my other articles if you aren’t familiar with it.

In any case, I found it strange that a Linux phone didn’t have an app for gemini in the open-store, so I went web searching, and found an app made for UT called “Gem”. After finding it, I also found out it was in the open-store as well, but that I couldn’t see it in the store from my phone, because it was written for Xenial (UT 16.04), and my phone is Focal (UT 20.04), a much newer version. This lead me to search the open-store specifically for Xenial only apps, and I found that there were perhaps hundreds of apps that didn’t get updated from Xenial to Focal. Most of these apps will still work in Focal if a few of the underlying portions were updated, and particularly rebuilt with a newer version of clickable with the proper apparmor settings.

Hence, I started on a little journey to update some of these apps. I decided to start with Gem, because I needed it. For the record, Gem can be found here:

https://open-store.io/app/gem.aaron

https://github.com/Aarontheissueguy/Gem

The first thing I did was download the source, and updated the clickable information and apparmor settings. You can read through the really boring commit here, if you’d like – taken from my repository, but the edits were the same for the original gem app:

https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/Gem/-/commit/346b3f2ddaaa76ce001eb9d3abee9e17c08abf33

And then did a pull request. I waited a few days, but it never got pulled in, and I tried emailing the original author, but his email address came back void. I also noted that the original author has not been on Github all year, so I felt that the author was no longer working on these projects. I also asked around on the Telegram groups for UT, and learned that the author was no longer an active part of the UT community.

The UT community encouraged me to release the app myself, so I made some branding changes and released it myself. You can find my app, Emerald, here:

https://open-store.io/app/emerald.alaskalinuxuser

https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/Gem

I didn’t really re-code anything, just updated a few things and I changed the color from pink to green for the app icon and links, so as not to compete with the original gem application. Hopefully others find it useful, I sure did, and I’m glad the original author made the app!

Linux – keep it simple.

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating UT apps: Ambient and Sudoku

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In my continuing quest to be useful to the Ubuntu Touch community, I recently found that there were about 300 apps made for Xenial, the 16.04 version of UT, that didn’t get updated for the current version of UT, which is Focal (20.04). Of these apps, I went through the list and crossed out all proprietary apps, and removed any that had current forks or were directly replaced by another app, as well as removing many from my list that no longer had a valid link to the source code. I suppose I could find it somewhere, but I didn’t want to waste time hunting. That left me with approximately 200 apps left that were possible candidates for an update to Focal.

Of course, I don’t think I can update all 200 apps, especially as each could be written in different programming languages, like rust, c++, godot, etc…. My skills are just not up to the task. However, for a lot of these apps, they simply need an updated clickable build script and some edits to json files and app armor. Granted, of the remaining apps, some are of poor quality, and some discernment has to be made.

That said, I created a spreadsheet for this task. On the spreadsheet, I have the app name, and a series of check boxes: upgraded, tested, pull request, contacted dev, dev responded, forked, updated on open-store. This allows me to keep track of my progress as I go along. I always start by downloading the code and attempting the upgrade. If it builds, I test it. If it works, I make a pull request and then email/telegram/contact the original developer. At that point I have to wait a few days and see if they respond.

If they do respond, sometimes they just tell me to do anything I want, or that maybe they will review and update the app with the changes. If they don’t respond, I fork the app and upload it as my own app (citing the original dev, and offering to take mine down if they update their app) on the open-store. (open-store.io)

Today’s post I thought I’d mention two that I posted on the open-store today.

Ambient – https://open-store.io/app/ambient.alaskalinuxuser

Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/ambient-ubuntu-phone

This app is a noise generator, playing sounds like rainfall, the ocean, a city, or pub, with a timer to help people fall asleep. I thought the app was interesting, so I updated it and contacted the developer. In this case, he was not interested in maintaining the app and said I could do as I pleased, so I forked it and posted it.

Sudoku – https://open-store.io/app/sudoku.alaskalinuxuser

Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/alaskalinuxuser/sudoku-app

This app was originally a core app of UT, meaning that the app was one of the default apps shipped with the operating system. Unfortunately, it fell off the radar somewhere along the line, and was not updated to the newer OS releases. I think it is because it has a network function to compare your score with other players. That part doesn’t work anymore, probably because they took down the server that it reached out to. Instead, if you go to that screen in the app, it just shows your score. Either way, it generates nice Sudoku puzzles and works great.

Of course, the credit goes to the original devs and authors, as I just am updating a few snippets of code or config files here and there to make it build on the current release of Ubuntu Touch.

Linux – keep it simple.

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating UT apps: GearSystem and other apps

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Continuing on my journey to update about 200 Ubuntu Touch apps from Xenial to Focal, I once again released more apps on the open-store. Among them was a personal favorite, which is GearSystem. GearSystem is a Sega Game Gear and Sega Master System emulator, so you can play all your …

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating UT apps: uHome and Lomiri action

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As I continue on my journey to update about 200 Ubuntu Touch apps from Xenial to Focal, I once again released more apps on the open-store. One of those updates was for an app called uHome, which is sort of like an old school Android launcher application, making your screen …

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating UT apps: Blackjack and more

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I am nearing the end of my journey to update about 200 Ubuntu Touch apps from Xenial to Focal. All of the apps have been updated that I can update. However, to clarify, that means I have updated them, not that they are released on the open-store yet. You can …

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
Updating UT apps: More to do lists and some errors

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Now that I am done with updating the 199 Ubuntu Touch apps from Xenial to Focal, I am waiting 7 days for a response from each developer, and then releasing the clicks on the open-store. You can check out the progress table below, but I'm really close to closing out …

AlaskaLinuxUser's Scratchpad
All those Pelican themes

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As you've already read in previous posts, I switched my blog from Wordpress to Pelican, for a simpler, smoother, static page interface that can still be built in an automated way. One of the cool things about Pelican is that it does allow themes and there are a lot of …