Known issue: https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues/448

@UniSuperBox Well as far as I can tell, Ubuntu Touch accesses Google Account data.

On my device Address Book and Calendar apps use Google Account configured in the system settings. Their data is being synced with Google Contacts and Calendar, respectively.

Isn't Ubuntu, mentioned in the mail, that 3rd party entity, which actually links my device to Google Account?

@kugiigi Thank you for explanation. Mystery solved. I left my comments in the issue tracker.

@kugiigi, @Lakotaubp What do you mean by "special pass"?
And how one can setup, for example, Contacts to use it?

@wgarcia I understand.

So the question is, will UBports do something about it?

According to Google Account info:

Ubuntu
Has access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Google Photos

I received the same message. What I really don't like about it is "some data" part without full specififcation:

some of the data of your Google Account, such as the content of Gmail.

I have submitted the issue to UT Tweak Tool bug tracker: https://gitlab.com/myii/ut-tweak-tool/issues/32

But it does not seem to be reproducible on other's people FP2 devices.

Could someone try the following in UT Tweak Tool:

• Set Scaling - Grid Unit to some non-default value, let say 26
• Accept Unity restart
• Set Scaling - Grid Unit to default, via "Restore default..." item. Warning: for me it was set to 13 and I had some difficulty to set it back. Although reboot of device seem to restore decent default of 23.
• Report your findings here and if you can confirm the issue - directly in the issue report linked above

Thanks.

The instructions you are referring to are aiming to backup all data needed to restore system to previous condition (excluding operating system itself, I believe). It looks like it worked for some people, not for me, though.

But it helped me to make backup of all data my own way, including system settings (now my Fairphone even presents itself as "BQ Aquarius 4.5", when connected via BT ).

Back to the instruction.

system-data and user-data are visible in /data only when your device is booted in recovery mode. When system is booted normally they are accessible via different location.

That is:

1. Connect your device to PC
2. Run adb devices (output should list your device as recognized)
3. Run adb reboot recovery

Now you should be able to do adb shell and listing of /data should show these folders.

At this point your adb pull of both should be fine.

I used adb from Ubuntu 19.04 repositories:

$ adb version
Android Debug Bridge version 1.0.39
Version 1:8.1.0+r23-5
Installed as /usr/lib/android-sdk/platform-tools/adb

$ apt-cache policy adb
adb:
  Installed: 1:8.1.0+r23-5
  Candidate: 1:8.1.0+r23-5
  Version table:
 *** 1:8.1.0+r23-5 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu disco/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Concerning root: I had to explicitly request it on Bq 4.5. On FP2 adb shell was with root access enabled by default.

@Flohack said in Migrate data from device to device:

TLDR; In case you get pull errors, leave system data out. You will loose all your settings in system-settings etc but the app data is in user-data and that folder must always be pullable without issues. You might want to delete the contents of .cache before to make it smaller...

Well, loosing all settings in system-settings etc. looks like a big deal. One needs to reconfigure everything then.

As far as I understand, system data is not and will not be pullable unless the tools are fixed with respect to handling "dangling" symlinks.

Unfortunately, I had issues with user-data as well.

By the way, do you agree that in the original instruction adb root should be added? I don't know which phone you used as a reference to create the instruction, but I have noticed that adb shell on Fairphone 2 has root enabled by default.

Looks like we start to get requirements for user data lint tool / backup prepare tool (maybe something for UT Tweak):

• Cleanup caches (is it safe to remove qmlcache/qml_cache/api_cache and friends?)
• Remove "dangling" sym-links
• ...

After switch to FP2 from Bq E4.5 I find myself in the situation, where usability is dropped for me due to small font sizes.

I found the scaling option in UT Tweak Tool, and changed the setting from 23 to 26, but it still feels sub-optimal. Everything was scaled, whereas I was looking to scale only font sizes.

Here is an instruction that worked for me to transfer data from Bq 4.5 to Fairphone 2

Required:

• SD-card
• Both device should have SD-card slot
• adb tools

Preliminary Steps

• Check that your SD-card is accessible on both devices
• While device is booted and connected to PC, figure out SD-card info needed for accessing it when device is booted into recovery:
  • In adb shell issue mount command
  • Note the device that is mounted to /media/phablet/<...>, example in my case

    <... -removed>
    /dev/mmcblk1p1 on /media/phablet/ubackup type vfat (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,uid=32011,gid=32011,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,showexec,utf8,flush,errors=remount-ro,uhelper=udisks2)
    

    Note that device /dev/mmcblk1p1 is mounted to /media/phablet/ubackup, which is SD card in my case, expect that last part of /media/phablet/ubackup will be different in your case. Make note of the device name (/dev/mmcblk1p1).

Backup data to SD card

1. If not done before: connect phone to PC while adb is running
2. Reboot phone into recovery: adb reboot recovery
3. Acquire root: adb root
4. Activate shell: adb shell
5. In the root shell (command prompt ends with # sign)
   5.1 Mount SD card with the following command (note that /dev/mmcblk1p1 above becomes /dev/block/mmcblk1p1) :

   mount -t vfat -o flush,utf8 /dev/block/mmcblk1p1 /sdcard
   

   5.2 Backup system-data and user-data partitions (commands below will also create log files, that can be examined for possible errors) :

   tar -czpv -f /sdcard/system-data.tgz /data/system-data/ >/sdcard/system-data.out 2>/sdcard/system-data.err
   

   tar -czpv -f /sdcard/user-data.tgz /data/user-data/ >/sdcard/user-data.out 2>/sdcard/user-data.err
   

   5.3 Check created archives. The commands below should not produce any output:

   tar -xzv -f /sdcard/system-data.tgz >/dev/null
   

   tar -xzv -f /sdcard/user-data.tgz >/dev/null
   

6. Power down your device (example for adb shell) :

   shutdown -P now
   

Restore data from the backup on SD card

For me it was repeat of the sequence from the previous section but with the target device connected. The only difference was in the final step.

In principle, external card reader device may require different device name in mount command of step 5.1 options. You can check it as indicated in the Preliminary Steps section above.

Repeat steps 1. ... 5.1 to make SD card accessible.

5. In the root shell (command prompt ends with # sign)
   5.1 Mount as in the 5.1 above
   5.2 Restore data:

   tar -xzv -f /sdcard/system-data.tgz
   

   tar -xzv -f /sdcard/user-data.tgz
   

6. Reboot your device

Found this topic again after a while, since screen of my bq 4.5 is not responding to touches anymore.

Tried to do backup as explained by @Flohack in Migrate data from device to device. Below are my observations and notes.

Sequence adb reboot recovery followed by adb pull /data/system-data have not copied anything, because it errored out:

$ adb pull /data/system-data
adb: error: failed to copy '/data/system-data/lib/ufw/user6.rules' to './system-data/lib/ufw/user6.rules': remote Permission denied

Added adb root to the mix to handle "Permission denied", and after a bit of copying I've got to the next error:

$ adb pull /data/system-data
adb: error: failed to copy '/data/system-data/var/log/installer/media-info' to './system-data/var/log/installer/media-info': remote No such file or directory

Looks like permission errors can be resolved. Why files are missing?

After digging a bit (cross-referencing results of broken symlinks in recovery and normal environments, looking into mounted filesystems and layout) I think it is because of "dangling" links pointing to nowhere for the following reasons:

• Parts of the file system are not available in the recovery environment, because not mounted, like many click packages
• There are broken links in the systems (links that are broken also in normal boot) accumulated through its lifetime due to bad behaviors of install/uninstall/upgrade tools and SW in general

All the above leads me to the following:

• Looks like adb pull should be run at least in rooted recovery (maybe it should also use -a switch to preserve permissions?)
• adb pull cannot handle "dangling" links

So in my experience adb pull is not a good tool to make a backup.

I would really appreciate, if someone could comment on the above and tip better and working ways to backup data so that it can be restored on the other device.

Currently I am looking into the option of creating backup on external sdcard using tar + gzip.

@dobey said in Howto rebuild UBports image for specific device from sources?:

Well, what I am looking for is description of steps that one needs to do, if he would like to try fix something in e.g. system-settings.

You can just build new debs with crossbuilder,

Well, I can't get even through this step, since as mentioned in the first message, crossbuilder just does not work for me.

push them to the device, make the rootfs r/w, and install the new specific debs (not all the binary packages that get built are necessarily installed). Or if there's a PR, CI will build debs in a repo, and you can use the ubports-qa tool on your device to upgrade the packages for a specific PR, to test. There's no need to rebuild and reflash the whole rootfs to test specific fixes.

Thanks for the story above, but at the moment stuff that seem to be so obvious to you does not make any sense to me... Need to do the first step - build something with crossbuilder, then I will try to decipher the rest.

@marc_aurel said in How to create the developer documentation of Unity8 for customizing?:

@dobey Thanks. Very clear answer. Do you have a recommendation to resolve the crossbuild issue? Or is it sufficuent to use cmake and make commands?

/me having similar issue with crossbuilder setup-lxd. Is 18.10 supported by crossbuilder?

@dobey said in Howto rebuild UBports image for specific device from sources?:

So, the rootfs is not specific to a device. Pretty much everything that can be built via crossbuilder is part of the rootfs, which you do not need to rebuild for your device. The linked "systemdev" documentation is about developing components at this level (services that run inside ubuntu, unity8 shell, system-settings, etc…).

Well, what I am looking for is description of steps that one needs to do, if he would like to try fix something in e.g. system-settings.

If what you want to build is a port for your device, the best place to start is https://docs.halium.org and the porting guide. They describe how to build the device-specific parts.

I want to understand, full development -> build -> deployment -> test cycle for supported device I have.

Is there a guide / how to, which covers details needed to rebuild UBports image for specific device from sources?

I am having troubles figuring out the following:

• Pre-requisites/requirements for setting up development environment, i.e. preferred OS, required tools, dependencies, versions (if relevant) etc.
• How to setup environment?
• How to get sources needed to build UBports image for specific device?
• How to build, install, test?
• ...

So far, I've found https://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/systemdev/testing-locally.html but got stuck pretty fast on crossbuilder setup-lxd which results for me in error:

LXD was installed but is not accessible. Please restart your computer.

Note that I tried reboot and it does not help

I've also seen found porting guide, but it covers initial creation of UBports image for new device, not rebuild UBports image for specific device from sources.

@root-ruud said in bq Aquaris 4.5 Ubuntu Touch (vivid/ubuntu 15.04) is not upgrading.:

1
I need two SIMs, only bottom slot is working at present, but it worked under the canonical version.
This is my daily phone and my work phone, I can not miss any calls. This is a deal-breaker.

Well, works for me. I use 2x SIMs on bq 4.5 / 16.04 - rc. Probably you need to file a bug, so that you can get some advice on how to detect what might be the problem.

2
morph browser turns white spontaneously, a restart is required to get pages loading properly.

Well. Yes. There are some indications that this might be related to amount of physical RAM available on the phone. Although I do not believe that it is related to memory, since for me just reload of the page normally helps.

3
I want to know exactly how long my calls lasted, incoming and outgoing.
not visible at present

It is there. In your call history - swipe left call you want to have an info on, tap (i). Or do you mean something else?

@advocatux Thanks for the tip. Reinstalled 16.04 / stable. Got switcher back... Will try rc