Ubports Newsletter 27th Oct

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UBports Community

Welcome to your UBports Newsletter

Slight delay with this edition for which we appologise. Mainly down to the old unforseen circumstances but it did give us the chance to move away from publishing on the same weekend as our Q&A. This will help cut out duplication and help fill in between Q&A's.

As we mentioned in the last newsletter, the joint promotion with our friends at Volla is continuing to run throughtout the month of October. So still giving you plenty of time to entre the raffle or just buy a Volla Phone 22 with a donation to UBports included. Details are further on in this edition.

On the back of the Volla promo we would also like to thank everyone who added a message about UBports and UT to their entries for the raffle. It is always good to hear that people really enjoy using UT and appreciate what we do. So a big thank you for that.

Many of you will have seen that Ubuntu reached the grand age of 19 on the 20th of October. We wished them a happy birthday on the day and look forward to 20th birthday celebrations next year.

The Ubuntu Touch project was started in 2011 by Canonical the founders of the Ubuntu distribution. Who can remember that first version and all the changes that have followed, including Marius continuing development of Ubuntu Touch and the forming of UBports? There are many of us who can remember getting their hands on first Bq Aquaris UT phone and look where we are now. Not always been straight forward or at times easy but we are still here and moving forward with the same enthusiasm, determination and most of all you, the Ubports Community. This November Canonical invited us to be part of the Ubuntu Summit in Riga, read more below.

UBports Newsletter Team.

Our friends at Volla are big supporters of #UBports, and are now offering you the chance to win a Volla Phone 22. Learn all about how to enter the raffle and win this fantastic prize in our blog post:

https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/win-a-volla-phone-22-running-ubuntu-touch-3898?

Development Updates

UT on Pine 64

This is the very latest update news from Oren for all Pine 64 devices running UT. If you want to follow developments even closer or get involved there is the Ubuntu Touch on Pine 64 group https://t.me/utonpine

Downloads are now hosted upstream: https://ci.ubports.com/job/focal-hybris-rootfs-arm64/job/master/

These are our images, ready for your usage, building daily. I’m still figuring out how we will have these distributed. I’ll be updating the pine64 wiki and the ubports wiki in the next few days pointing to this link, most likely.

You can select Last Successful Artifacts or click on the [+]View button, then click to download the .raw.xz file of your respective device; then flash it in the same way as our downstream images.

Please note: these are still r/w and still have to be upgraded through apt. However, you should notice multiple improvements with ContentHub, the modem, and even GPS support. We are actively working on r/o and system-image updates, you can follow the progress on the Ubuntu Touch on Pine64 Telegram. For this, we will need to set up the images to be in tarball form as well, which can be uploaded to a system-image server, and have a new 20.04/arm64/mainline/devel channel to access.

Issues/other comments:

network + modem seem to die on the PinePhone Pro when put to sleep. sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager ofono will get them back on, but we believe this is a problem with the kernel. We are actively working on this too.

external monitor support is still poor, and camera is not working yet. Again, we are working on this.

almost all of contenthub works. However, some things seem to require apparmor profile updates. For example, you can now correctly upload images to telegram, and you can download them from telegram, but trying to have telegram open the downloaded file will still fail. You have to locate it manually.

GPS should be working OOTB, but in reality it seems to be acting slightly funny. If it does not work right away, we have found switching to our branch that fixed it (sudo ubports-qa install focal_-_PR_location-service_27), then right after removing it (sudo ubports-qa uninstall focal_-_PR_location-service_27), it seems to bring GPS online right away. Weird. (note - GPS is only available on the phones. It requires the modem to use, but does not require a SIM - it just requires an internet connection of any kind.)

PineTab2 WiFi has new, safer one-liners! sudo systemctl start pinetab2-wifi-enable + reboot to turn it on, sudo systemctl start pinetab2-wifi-disable + reboot to turn it back off. These are not persistent, so you can’t systemctl enable them.

Finally, I could not have got this far without @Luigi311 + @fuseteam, huge thanks to both of them for helping me take this project on 😁

To keep up with developments for Ubuntu Touch on Pine64

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

and TELEports https://t.me/utonpine

5G on UT

5g will arrive on Ubuntu Touch in the near future when the new ofono-binder-plugin is merged in our codebase. Firstly arriving in devel hopefully prior to OTA-3 it will then work through the update channels before hitting stable. This is exciting news so keep your eye out for further news.

News From The Community

Ubuntu Summit, Riga, Latvia, 3-5 Nov

We are really looking forward to this. Alfred will be giving a presentation on snaps on UT at the summit and we will also have an Ubuntu Touch desk showing the best of UT. This is a great opportunity for us to meet friends old and new and let them know with our usual enthusiam for UT our plans for the future both short long term. If you are there please come and say hello, as always we would love to meet you and chat about Ubuntu Touch.We would also like to thank Canonical and Ubuntu for inviting us.

The full story will be in the next news letter.

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 126

Our latest Q&A edition126 was on 21st October you catch up on our YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcEN1ME_WUU and the blog and audio version will be available soon.

Q&A 124 blog and audio are now available, please use this link https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-124-3899

You will notice a change in the audio version as it is now hosted on archive.org and this edition has a 30 sec intro so don't panic just sit back and enjoy.

The blog and audio for Q&A 125 has also now been published https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-125-3900

New Contributors Meeting

We also held our first new contributors meeting on the 4th October. The meeting included potential new contributors to Ubuntu Touch and UBports as well as members of the community. The aim is not only to help point people to the right groups for them and help get them started but also to improve the whole onboarding process. One outcome was that a section on our Forum would be useful and this will be available shortly.
The next meeting will be in November so if you have thought about contributing to UBports but were not sure how keep an eye out for date and time on our news channels and in the next newsletter.

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