This is a collection of common issues that appear after or during SailfishOS upgrades.
Its main purpose is to have an index/starting point to quickly find posts dealing with similar problems and perhaps finding a solution.
NOTE: Many of the tools and methods here are not supported by Jolla! If you decide to deploy/follow them, you may not get further assistance from Jolla Care.
Also, verify the solution you find actually matches your problem! Do not blindly follow advice you do not fully comprehend!
Table of contents
Intro / general advice
Here is some general advice to increase your chances for a smooth update:
- Read the Release Notes, and heed the advice and notes there. Also read the Known Issues section.
- Ensure plenty of space on the system partition (> 800 GB)
- Use a stable and plentiful internet connection (you do not want timeouts during the download phase)
- Disable problematic third-party RPM repositories before starting the update
- Don not be an early bird: in the first couple of hours after a release, everybody seems to be updating. Try to wait a day or two.
- Read the forum here in the mean time on what works and what seems to cause problems.
- Have your battery well charged, and if it is old, keep it charged!
Nice to have:
- Backups! Inform yourself about the flaws of Jolla’s backup tool and ways how to mitigate these rsp. work around them.
- Computer with USB port, proper cable, Android/Fastboot USB device drivers, and android tools (adb, fastboot), all tested and working with your phone
- Developer mode enabled and SSH server enabled
- Downloaded flashable images for both the current installed version, AND the version to be updated to. This is to have the recovery image available that matches the installed version.
(And by the way, if you don not have the recovery image for the version you are currently running, it is actually on the device under/boot/hybris-recovery.img, from the packagedroid-hal-XXXXXX-img-recovery, so you can copy that off the device.)
Before an update
| Symptom | Possible Causes | Solution | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| The latest update isn’t available for me | Update is in EA phase or you are using a Free version of SFOS | Wait about a week or two for the proper release. The GUI updater is only available on licensed SailfishOS installations. |
Early Access, Sailfish X License, sfos-upgrade
|
| Updater tells me to uninstall (a lot of) apps | The checker isn’t perfect | See release notes and these links → | How to interpret the message, Why it appears |
| There isn’t enough space on the system partition | Jolla’s partitioning scheme is from 2013 | Either uninstall large native apps (games, etc.) Programs like Space Inspector or ncdu can help finding what uses much space) Note that removing Android apps and other stuff from the home partition will not help. Enlarge the root partition. |
LVM volume resize guide Use unused partitions |
| Updater is “Unable to determine update size” | inconsistent repo state | Article at Jolla’s Zendesk |
During an update
| Symptom | Notes | Cause | Solution | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Updater UI hangs | while updating, the progress bar freezes, the process never finishes | unknown | Wait as long as you can, after that, power off the device and hope for the best | One, Two |
After an update
Boot Loops and “Black Screens of Death”
If the device doesn’t come up again after an update, reasons can be complex.See the general strategy how to proceed below.
| Symptom | Notes | Possible Causes | Solution | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boot Loop I | device reboots after boot logo (Sony) appears | |||
| Boot Loop II | device reboots after entering security code | |||
| Black Screen I | device hangs after boot logo (Sony) appears | often incomplete update or incompatible libraries installed | ||
| Black Screen II | device hangs after entering security code | on some devices this can take a couple of minutes. do not panic | If appearing immediately after the update, sometimes a hard reboot fixes this. | link |
The general strategy would be:
-
if there is no data valuable to you on the device, re-flash it using the latest image from http://shop.jolla.com.
-
If the device hangs, see if you can connect to it using either SSH, or USB networking. If you can, try to gather logging information about the failure.
-
Otherwise, obtain a recovery image and enter Recovery mode
-
Using Recovery Mode, mount the system partition and turn on Persistent Journalling
-
Boot your device normally again
-
Boot into Recovery mode once more
-
Using Recovery Mode, mount the system partition and gather the journal files from
/var/log/journal -
Analyse the journal files and see if you can identify specific issues that cause problems.
-
Using the information from the journal files, seek additional help, from this table, the forum, IRC etc.
SFOS update related issues
| Symptom | Notes | Possible Causes | Solution | Links |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The update was aborted, but my device shows it has the latest version | WARNING do not install or update any apps while in this state!! | incomplete update, inconsistent SSU state | see the link and its references → | New SFOS version number without upgrade - #8 by olf |
| I did not start any update, but my device shows it has a newer SailfishOS version | WARNING do not install or update any apps while in this state!! | inconsistent SSU state | see the link → | Bug osupdate-check.service sets ssu re |
| Standard (Jolla) apps do not start | Immediately after an update, refreshing and Store app updates are performed in the background. | Wait a for bit, the problem might solve itself. | ||
| Many network-related apps do not start | Have you messed with /etc/hosts or similar files? |
May be a file ownership issue | link | |
| Android app support does not start | Sometimes, uninstalling and re-installing it from Jolla Store helps. Note this will remove all your Android apps! |
|||
| My favourite app does not start or has problems | various | Check the apps issue tracker, search the forum, see OpenRepos comments section, start it from terminal and capture logs | ||
| Installing a new app fails | dependencies are missing | Try pkcon refresh. Check the apps issue tracker, discussion forum, or contact the developer. |
||
| Cannot use zypper or pkcon, installation of apps fails | corruption of repo or cache files | Clean package cache, correct repos |
link one, link two |
|
| programs complaining about missing libraries | can be observed in terminal/console | probably an incomplete update, OR outdated/incompatible app installed OR dangerous OpenRepos repo active | Try pkcon refresh first, maybe version --dup or sfos-update --verify. Symlinks can sometimes be a temporary(!) solution |
|
| programs complaining about undefined symbols | can be observed in terminal/console | likely an incomplete update, OR incompatible third-party library installed | Symlinks can sometimes be a temporary(!) solution | Example |
| My bug has not been fixed | Was it announced to be fixed in the Release Notes or Change Log? Then amend the original bug report. Otherwise bump existing bug reports with new information. Wait and hope. | – | ||
| Contact Avatars disappear | bug | need to restore images from backup | Contact Photos Gone | |
| This update made my CPU load/battery usage go crazy! | Media Indexing running | Immediately after an update, all the media is usually re-indexed. This process is CPU-intensive and may run for a long time, depending on amount and complexity of the media to be indexed. It should resolve itself after a while though. | ||
| – | – | – | – | – |
Thanks for building it!