Ubuntu Phone : Change the device name

Question

I want to change the default device name ("bq Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition") of my Ubuntu Phone .

How can I proceed?

Answer 1

Bluetooth

At least for Bluetooth you can do the following:

1. Use adb

To use adb you must have developer mode enabled and adb installed (the sdk is enough, you don't need the entire IDE, which is Android specific anyway). If you have it installed you can follow these commands

$ adb shell
phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ sudo vi /etc/machine-info
[sudo] password for phablet: {fill in your passphrase/PIN}

Now you can enter the name you want after PRETTY_HOSTNAME

PRETTY_HOSTNAME="Your preferred name here"

In stead of vi you can also use nano (i.e.:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ sudo nano /etc/machine-info

)

There is lots of help available on how to use vi or nano

2. Use a terminal app

In the Ubuntu Store there is an app called Terminal. When installed, you can use it to type the same commands as for adb.

Setting up adb is far more work, but I had it installed already and I prefer using a real keyboard over an on-screen keyboard for these kind of things.

Device Hostname

You can also change the device hostname, but it is doesn't work as well as changing the PRETTY_HOSTNAME setting.

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~% sudo hostname <new-hostname>

Note that the actual hostname must be a valid hostname

A (big) caveat with this is, that – apparently – /etc/ is not writeable by default, meaning that hostname will not update /etc/hosts since that file is not writeable. To be able to resolve its own hostname, the system needs /etc/hosts to contains a reference to its own hostname, otherwise you'll get error messages like "unable to resolve host ", since /etc/hosts only contains references to ubuntu-phablet.