UBports Newsletter 19th Sept

UBports Community

Welcome to the UBports Newsletter,

It has been sometime since the last newsletter in fact far too long. We appologise for that and are getting back on track with publication. The newsletter is a valuable way for us to let you know what is happening and more importantly an excellent way for you to let your fellow Community members know what you are doing or using Ubuntu Touch for.

The Communities involvement is what makes UBports and Ubuntu Touch so special and worthwhile being involved in, so why not let others know how you use it or are involved. You will see there are a few items from Community members in this edition so please join in and send your articles, items or ideas to socials@ubports.com

Don't worry about them being perfect, we can sort that if needed. In fact if you would like to be more involved with UBports or Ubuntu Touch in any way or have ideas or thoughts about UBports or Ubuntu Touch please let us know using the socials@ubports.com email.

We also need Community members who can get involved helping to produce and publish the newsletter. If that is you please also use the socials@ubports.com email to get in touch.

Development updates

20.04 OTA-2 is out!

OTA-2 for Ubuntu Touch 20.04 is out and in case you missed the blog, here is the link: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-ota-2-focal-20-04-3894 for all you need to know.

So what comes next?

OTA-3, which should be available in a few weeks time.

Development goals from Marius

The UT Roadmap is now split into 3 different "tracks". These will be completely separated from each other to avoid blockages.

1. User experience / consumer ready / Paper cuts

This focuses on improving the user experience and has a strong preference for fixing issues that overall improves the user experience for non developers, we want to look at these issues with without our developer glasses on as we tend to make our own little workarounds when using the system. We want to be pragmatic and fix these users issues that block Ubuntu Touch from being an real alternative to Android and iOS

2. Dist upgrade

Here we will focus on upgrading our base to 24.04 in the same time frame as Ubuntu.

3. Upgrades and maintenance

Here we want to focus on fixing long standing issues and upgrade to latest components, like fo rexample switch to Wayland by default on phones, upgrade to mir 2.x etc.

TheVancedGamer

Muhammad aka TheVancedGamer has been working hard on a few Ubuntu Touch projects of late and making great progress. These include Halium 13, alongside focal for FP2 , and porting the Galaxy A33 for a first H13 device :) So here in their own words is a brief blog.

Hi. My name is Muhammad. I'm a 14 year old high school student in Pakistan, and ever since COVID I've spent countless hours tinkering with Ubuntu Touch (UT), fixing up old projects to work and porting devices. COVID was what got me started with UT, when I was trying to port my ancient Huawei P8 Lite, and that device was the basis of my porting experience. I'm currently porting the OnePlus One to Focal, which I took up because a community member advertised cake for it (yum! :P), as well as trying to contribute to Halium and UT projects in general. Now the OnePlus One is quite mature, I'd say I would even bring UT22.04 to it once it's out :D

and now he has Rockwork working again on Focal

Development Updates

Here is the latest UT on Pine 64 info provided by Oren Kopfler

1. PineTab and PineTab2 now both have 20.04 support, with flash, plug and play images (no bootloader installation required).

2. We now have a distinct focal pine branch that we track in addition to the UBPorts focal branch.

3. All four Pine devices use the same kernel, which continues to track the mainline kernel versioning, putting us at 6.5.0 right now.

4. In addition all four devices now have proper pages on https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io

5. Likewise our information on the official Pine64 wiki (wiki.pine64.org) has been updated.

6. All downstream packages besides the kernel have now been shipped upstream into UBPorts repositories getting us closer to OTA updates (builder pipeline has also been cleaned up significantly to get closer to OTA).

Of the work that needs to be done still:

1. Camera is actively being worked on using libcamera as the base software.

2. While there are still many struggles with the usage of ofono + sensorfw to get modem and rotation working, stability from both of those platforms has improved, as has the modems stability overall. We have almost everything showing up correctly on the command line side, it is just a matter of some Lomiri integration fixes.

3. Most other distributions use modemmanager + iio-sensor-proxy for Pine64 devices, both of which provide significantly better stability for our devices, so we are also considering Lomiri integrations with those tools either instead of or in addition to ofono + sensorfw for mainline devices on Lomiri/UT.

For other Ubuntu Touch on Pine64

https://forums.ubports.com/topic/9221/ubuntu-touch-on-pine64

and TELEports

https://t.me/utonpine

Daniel Schielder: TOUCHID mobile development environment for UT

Touch IDE, the mobile development environment for Ubuntu Touch. Implement the possibility to publish apps created in Touch IDE directly to the Open Store. This will be a brand new feature to make it possible that more developers will create great apps for Ubuntu Touch.

To fulfill this feature, I have the following key points to achieve this:

- Implement a command that enables a Ubuntu Touch theme so that apps created in Touch IDE look like 'real' native Ubuntu Touch apps.

- Implement some checks to stop spam and flooding the Open Store with "Hello World" apps.

- Keeping all assets directly in the Touch IDE script (Icon, Description, Version management, API Key ...)

- Using the Open Store API to publish the apps

- At the moment I am not sure if I will implement this feature also in the online version of Touch IDE (www.touchide.net).

Technically It will follow what clickable does.

Apps created from Touch IDE will be based on HTML/Javascript inside a QT container, but they will look like and feel like real native Ubuntu Touch apps and, of course, will run offline. They will run on Focal and I will keep Touch IDE up-to-date.

What is implemented so far is an options panel where you can specify all relevant information for publishing the app (see screenshots attached). I did not implement the publishing function yet.

What I want to do is:

- if there is no existing record, first create it with the relevant data

- publish the app package to the open store based on the app data

I hope that I get it running by the end of this year.

Training videos on clickable

Four clickable training videos will soon be available on the UBports YouTube channel. The four videos are:

Using Clickable | Ubuntu Touch App Development #1

The Timer Component | Ubuntu Touch App Development #2

API Call Using XMLHttpRequest | Ubuntu Touch App Development #3

API Call Using Fetch | Ubuntu Touch App Development #4

Each one will give clear step by step instructions and as you work through build upon what you have learned. Links to resources will also be included.

Thanks to Sander,Felix and Terence the UBports Training Team

News From The Community

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 123

Marius and Alfred presented the Ubuntu Touch Q&A Saturday on 2nd Sept at 19:00 UTC https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tedLPBTDxbU to watch again, blog to follow.
The next Q&A is planned for the 23-09-2023 see you there.

Membership Committee Election
Email notification for those eligable to vote have been sent for the Election of a new Membership Committee. Voting to take place on 22nd of October.

FOSDEM 2024

Fosdem 2024 https://fosdem.org/2024/news/2023-09-02-fosdem-2024-dates/ Might seem some time away but will arrive quickly. Prepare those talks and presentations now well ahead of the deadline. We also need people who can help out at the event, please see the Forum https://forums.ubports.com/topic/9339/fosdem-2024 More information as we get closer.

orum

Supporting Ubuntu Touch and UBports

There are many ways you can help and support UT and UBports.

One of these is our Merchandise store (now run by Moem) where you can buy yourself or someone else a Ubuntu Touch, UBports shaped gift.

Another is by making a donation. One at a time or on a more regular basis. No matter how large or small, please remember they are very much appreciated and that you are helping directly the development of UT!

You can also donate something else which is as equally valued by us, your time and enthusiasm. If you would like to get involved please do. If you are not already on the Forum https://forums.ubports.com it is a great place to start. There are many other ways you can help your fellow UBports Community members so please join in and lets us know how you want to help at socials@ubports.com

UBports Sponsors