i’ve been editing the flashable images for so long that i’ve forgotten the taste of food, sam. here is how to do it in recovery mode without flashable images. (works on JP2026 and 10III and probably every official sfos image 4.6+ on every phone). note that both changes only work before first boot.
i make three edits, remove luks marker, change defaultuser=>nemo, and make root lvm 10GiB. that last one i don’t know how to do in recovery mode.
dont do this, btw, it will brick your phone and there are no flashable images.
factory reset phone without rebooting
enter recovery mode (volup + power for boot menu, voldn to select)
telnet (rndis_host, dhcpcd, telnet 10.42.66.66)
start sshd from recovery menu (ignore the warranty voiding message. are you some sort of chicken? seriously, this is a little upsetting jolly boys)
Probably should add some disclaimers that copy-pasting most of commands/scripts found in the forum will fail as they will default to ‘defaultuser’ (I feel like nemo ship has sailed)
i will once again take this time to deride jolla for using defaultuser instead of sailor or anything that:
is fewer than 8 chars so that, for example, the builtin ls on the phone doesn’t truncate it. not to mention our poor fingies. who decides to increase something so fundemental by 300%?
isn’t CATEGORICALLY CONFUSING. the default user is defaultuser. but who’s on first?
isn’t so depressingly unaesthetic. defaultuser is hard to read, boring, and honestly the worst choice
is even slightly thematic. nemo was so fun, and i get that we had to leave it, but why not finn? reef? fish? kai? wade? diver?
imagine opening up a terminal and typing: ssh dakkar@nautiphone. you stole that from us.
nemo’s boat has not, nor will it ever, “sail”. the nautilus is a submarine, and you will pry this little piece of joy out of my cold dead hands if you want it so badly
edit: on a side note, anyone who both wants to set the user to nemo, AND wasn’t scared off by ‘this will brick your phone’, has probably been around here long enough to not need that piece of advice
Yeah I get you, but the audience changed, instead of nostalgic nokia refugees you now get android-exes who will brick native sfos gesture flow (no quick event access) just to bring an android gesture used by a couple of apps (and they’re all super happy to apply all kinds of patches, until they brick their phone first time and become more cautious hopefully), some will definitely follow and then get confused why a script that has /home/defaultuser/ hardcoded doesn’t seem to work
it would probably Just Work. i meant literally ‘i dont know’, not that ‘it is not known’.
i wasnt brave enough to try figuring it out without a flashable image
I would like to be able to change the username, as is common on Linux desktops. Maybe allowing users to set it during the initial setup would be enough for me. It’s probably, and understandably, not a high priority for Jolla, but it would be a nice finishing touch in a future update—who knows?
I’m sure a lot of people will want to change the name to John Doe (or john doe in some weird unicode chars), whether you can reliably test nothing breaks within the system is another thing (also system username vs what is displayed somewhere else in GUI is also not really tied, so maybe for the ‘wants’ a visual acknowledgement is enough), still a warning when posting such instructions would be nice, might save us all a few threads
(then again there is: don’t do this, it will brick your phone; so I guess we’re golden)
I let many things go for personal sanity maintenance, but y’all are on point: lameness of defaultuser vs original top gun marketing asset nemo is tough to swallow, even years after.
hmm? why change it after logging in? you’d have to move home, edit /etc/[passwd|group|shadow], and update all absolute references to /home/defaultuser in config files etc. that’s WAY more dangerous than just editing a single text file. my warning was to deter noobs from doing something that they dont understand to accomplish something they dont need; if you’re comfortable doing stuff like this anyway, what i propose is almost certainly the easiest+safest way to do it. plus, you get to do it from a laptop instead of poking at a tiny screen.
also i dont think you can remove LUKS after setting it up. at least, i couldnt get it to boot the time i tried it on my 10 III.
EDIT: i still stand by that this is unnecessary to do at all, and until we get images and reliable and repeatable fastboot, it’s not worth the risk. i just mean that if youre gonna risk it anyway, my proposal is safer, relatively speaking.
And if we want to change the username but keep encryption, is it possible with your method?
From what I see, step 8 takes care of renaming only so I would only have to ignore step 6, is it right ?
