Hi All
I have been very busy recently, porting apps to my new Jolla (which arrived in the nick of time for the close of 2013). As a result I have rather neglected this blog.
That notwithstanding, I have created a number of mini-demos to illustrate interesting things I came across while porting to Sailfish.
I hope to post more details on some of these over then next few weeks, but for the moment here are links to the demos on Github.
Out of the box it is not possible to connect to your new Jolla via SSH over USB from OSX.
This is inconvenient: for instance I do lots of development work on the train, where there is no WLAN (or rather it there is, but not free), or at work, where I can't connect the Jolla to the corporate network, and have not got it (yet) to connect to the Visitor WLAN.
But with a bit of tweaking it is possible to get an SSH over USB connection going.
In a much earlier article, I showed how we can connect to a Nokia N9 phone with an RSA key for pas wordless SSH access in much the same way we connect to the Sailfish Emulator and SDK.
Surprise surprise, exactly the same is possible with a real Jolla device. No more typing in long passwords!
Black Courier shows commands typed on your development host.
Blue Courier shows commands typed on your Jolla (via SSH).
This article show how to do this for OSX and Linux. With a few extra steps, the same should be possible from Windows using Putty. See the previous example on connecting via Putty.
As new versions of the Sailfish SDK are released, so installing stuff changes a little.
Because of that, over the past few days I have made several updates to this article to reflect these changes, especially the use of PkCon / PackageKit.
http://flyingsheeponsailfish.blogspot.ch/2013/11/deploying-additional-packages-to.html
As I used QtLocation and QtPositioning in the examples, I am also posting a link to this tutorial
https://github.com/b0bben/SailfishOS_MapTutorial
This tutorial gives more in-depth advice on the use of QtLocation and QtPositioning, in addition to how to install.
Latest update is 24 Dec 2013 11:40 UK time.
One of the areas that raises the most questions on the Sailfish Developers' mailing list is the sticky topic of Installing additional packages to the Sailfish Emulator and SDK. Many developers, including myself have found installation very confusing.
The reasons for the confusion are clear: there is no official documentation on this topic yet, thought it is promised; there are a number of different ways that a package can be installed; both the Emulator and SDK may required installation; each package is available in a number of flavours; and then there is the challenge of identifying the correct package in the first page, and determining the correct name of that package. And if that was not enough, due to the refactoring of Qt Mobility from Qt 4 to Qt 5, some of our favourite components are now offered by quite different packages.
This post should give you a broad understanding of the different installation techniques. To those who live and breath Linux, who first compiled the kernel before they went to school, much of this may be obvious. To the rest of us from different development backgrounds it is less so, hence this post
We will look at zypper, PkCon, ScratchBox2, yaml and spectacle. We will find out how to install "by hand*, and automatically on building and running.
Hi All
As announced by Jarko here there is a refresh of the Sailfish Alpha available now.
This post lists some immediate differences I have noticed, and some changes I had to make to get "things" working again.
As / If I discover other stuff, I will update this post
Note this article is work-in-profess, reflecting work that is work-in-progress, and will be updated / corrected as the migration moves forwards . . .
Last update is: 06 Nove 2013
It is the weekend, but as it is wet and cold outside, with new snow only a few hundred metres higher, there is no flying today. So I am back to programming, and more importantly porting my app Landed to the Sailfish Alpha 2.
As I explained in my last post, recently I have concentrated on the Harmattan version of Landed, making it easier to use, and adding more functionality. While it is not yet finished (will it ever be?). Landed is now fully functional, and thus another stab at porting to the Sailfish Alpha 2 makes sense.
This time, rather than porting all of Landed, I decided to cut out the section I had spent most time on recently into a throwaway demo, and port that. I know from my first attempt that porting all of Landed will take quite some effort: Porting part of it first follows the old software engineering concept of solving large problems by dividing into smaller problems.
The demo is called MigratePhoneContactsDemo. I will soon post the Harmattan code, and the ported Sailfish equivalent code to Github, and add links here.
This article charts the progress of the porting. As the porting is not yet finished at the time I start this article, I will revisit the article over the next few days and make updates as I find solutions, and as I walk into new problems. I will try and keep the article at a high level, and will add child posts if I need to go into detail on particular challenges.
