News and Update
AppLee and Alfred presented.
New improvements
VoLTE has been enabled for Poco X3. In TELEports there is now a block and unblock facility. Some important changes have been made towards verifying Wi-Fi connections. Numtian is the MMS daemon and it has seen some modifications. Ofono has been tweaked to handle switching from IPV4 to IPV6 more effectively. QtMir has been refined.
Encryptation proof of concept testing
Alfred has been doing some work on Home folder encryption using the FairPhone 5. He showed a video of a FairPhone 5 booting up and decrypting after entry of a passcode. It uses fsScript. The intention is that the encryption should be automatic. At the moment, not all of the components needed are in the rootfs but the intention is to add them. The Lomiri greeter also needs a rewrite to incorporate the changes. The biggest challenge still remaining is to get the virtual keyboard to display during start-up.
The encryption and description mechanism is not engaged every time the screen display locks.
OpenStore apps
OpenStore has had a refresh. There is a new UI and a new server.
There is an update to the vpradio webapp. Johan has also worked on Killer Sudoku and an unofficial Trello app.
Calendar is a system app and it is just received some major fixes.
Paperless UT uploads your documents to paperless-ngx. Luksus has now updated it so that it uploads :)
Pavlo has done some work on the battery indicator, Upower Indicator Fork.
Sponsors were thanked.
Questions
The News section of our forum is the best place to post questions for the Q&A. YouTube live chat, Telegram and Matrix are other places to post a question.
If you didn't know, the Forum questions get priority.
FairPhone 5
Kimo wants to buy a FairPhone 5 and wants to know how far it has progressed and whether it is suitable as a daily driver? It already works pretty well on Focal and it is the development platform of choice for Noble, so it has that covered. It is not a cheap phone, but if you can afford it, this will be the general recommendation.Connecting an external desktop is particularly easy with this device.
Praise Brian!
MrT1001 asked to give a shout out to Brian for his amazing work on the OpenStore. So say all of us. Praise Brian!New portings for Noble
Ruben Carneiro says Hi. He asks whether porters should wait until Noble is very mature before they get their devices ready for it. Alfred acknowledged that there have been some issues with devices, but he suggested that those can be resolved in the porting group.AppLee asked whether an Android 12 base is absolutely necessary for Noble or whether patching might be enough. Alfred clarified that the pixel 3A was a dead end because VoLTE could not be achieved, so equipping for Noble would’ve been pointless.
Social Media
Luksus urged a more effective approach to social media. We have a small communications team, but yes, we could do a lot more which really means involving more people. Volunteers are always welcome.Encryptation
In response to a comment in live chat, Alfred explained that the encryption facility will either need an enabling app or being embedded in Settings.At the moment it needs a fresh install and points to a different Home folder, encrypting everything in that. It is solely aimed at the Home not at apps. Adding a few extra folders would be fairly trivial though.
One thing to bear in mind is that Wi-Fi data is not stored in the home folder so that will not be encrypted.
Merchandise
Kristoffer committed on the limited range of merchandise in the shop and asked whether it could be extended for example by providing more colours for the hoodies? All suggestions on this kind of thing are welcome, but it takes us back to whether there are enough people available to do them.Pre-installed Ubuntu Touch
Ben asked about selling phones with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed. One of our partners is Volla and they do indeed cell phones with it already installed. We are hoping to work towards doing the same with FairPhone. We are working on other possibilities, but of course tariffs may affect those arrangements.Encryptation and Wi-fi
Tvoje commented that Wi-Fi is in /etc and suggested that we encrypt that too in order to prevent any damage caused by app spoofing.Issues like that are going to need a lot more investigation. At the moment we are at the proof of concept stage.
At the moment we don’t have any encryption at all so let’s take this in easy stages. System logs will also not be encrypted but that is just the way it is.
Morph browser
Balint asked about the ongoing development of Morph browser. They have had some issues, especially when playing videos.Major development means basing on Qt6 and the web engine which makes use of that. What we want is Qt6 for the whole system rather than patches.
Alfred is still working on mini browser from time to time. One of the challenges is to integrate copy paste which we don’t have at the moment. A reminder that Alfred is the only person working on this.
Much thanks to Alfred for all the heavy lifting he is doing.
There are probably developers out there who don’t even know about Ubuntu Touch but would help out if they did. So put the word around.
Closed systems
Kristoffer said that we must be very fed up with having to always rely on proprietary blobs. Why don’t people protest more about closed systems?Ideally, we would like to have an open system as championed by Pine but we also want it to be fast and modern. We would love to get rid of Halium. Having a Mainline kernel would remove a major drag on implementing new features.
Our established approach has very much reliance on the work done by other porting communities.
Brax have expressed their interest in working with us.
See you next time :-)