| Hello community!Welcome to the UBports Foundation email newsletter, October 15, 2021 |
From your editorHello dear people! This time just a short word from me. I could tell you about the podcast/interview I did with Dutch Business News Radio but that is only nice if you understand Dutch. I could tell you about the upcoming, again Dutch, UBports meetup on October 23rd, but it's just a small pub and can hardly handle the 2236 subscribers to his news letter. Yes, you read that correctly, 2236! We are running an amazing project is all I can say. Did you notice how 2 month ago we supported 55 devices and now we are at 77? Again, amazing! I know, not all device are supported a 100%, but some are pretty well supported! And that is all done by you, our community. Not all 2236 people I know, but still, maybe someday? :-).
To be honest, we are still running the fund raising effort for the porting to 20.04 and every bit helps to get us closer to that goal.You can go to our webshop and select one of the "donation" products. More info on our donate page https://ubports.com/donate.
If you for some reason want to contribute other peoples money to our project, you can do that too! On this url (https://linux30.b1-systems.de/) you find a page where the project with the most votes wins a nice sum of money. Please vote for UBports! I know the page is in the German laguage but there are translation sites like deeple.com and translate.google.com to help you out.
As usual we have an edition packed with informational goodies.Pine has some nice new products releases today. And we are looking for a volunteer for the role of test manager. We have plenty of people interested in testing, but someone has to manage this process.
As always, stay safe and happy hacking!
Jeroen Baten | |
News hot from the pressJust a quick heads-up for all those Pine fans out there. Finally I can share the news with you good people. Today, October 15th, at 14:00 UTC, Pine has launched the PinePhone Pro (successor to the PinePhone) and the PineNote (a direct competitor to the reMarkable, but way more open).
I have several links for you if you like: I asked a designer to make a mock-up of UT on the new PinePhone Pro and this is what it could look like. Nice, right? Let's start porting!
Apps in the spotlight
Here are some new Ubuntu Touch apps to try out, selected by Mateo Salta and presented in the latest Q&A session: You can find all these apps as usual on the OpenStore site (https://open-store.io/). Please remember that OpenStore has a built-in option to donate to app creators. We urge you to use that button, so that we'll get more great apps on Ubuntu Touch. | Help needed!If you have some spare time, we could use some help in the following domains: Just as we have Mateo Salta putting news together about apps in OpenStore for the UBports Q&A session, it would be great to have a volunteer or volunteers to bring us a round-up of news about device ports. Talk to Dalton (@UniversalSuperBox) if you want to do this. If you have skills (especially in JavaScript) that would help in developing the UBports installer, please reach out to Jan Sprinz (@NeoTheThird). The installer is vital to getting people on board, but we need more people working on it. Often, the issues people have when installing are simple failures to set up properly or tick the right options. You can make the installer better by adding prompts for those. We want to make sure that every Ubuntu Touch release we ship is better than the previous one. That's why every release goes through a QA (Quality Assurance) process. And you can help with it. If you want to know how, read our HOWTO article on https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/we-need-you-to-help-test-our-releases-3781. And if by any chance you want to become our test manager, join the UBports QA and testing group (https://t.me/ubports_qa_team) on Telegram and talk to Florian (@Flohack).
We still can use some help with Ubuntu 20.04Our UBports community is growing. We have a lot of volunteers, but for some specific tasks we need to hire specialists. The move to the Ubuntu 20.04 base is such a task.
With Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), you'll be able to run more applications, especially if they only support the Wayland protocol for its user interface. This will make it easier to port desktop apps to run on your phone.
The move to systemd and the support of Wayland will also make Ubuntu Touch more compatible under the hood with other Linux distributions. This will foster collaboration with other mobile Linux distributions such as Mobian, especially on non-Android devices such as the PinePhone.
The move to 20.04 is a must to keep getting security updates and improvements for the base packages. The sooner the upgrade has happened, the sooner the UBports developers are able to work on new features such as playing videos protected by DRM and video calling with WebRTC in the browser.
If every member donated $10 a month for some time, this would give a major boost to our growing community.
With all those donations we can hire developers to build a better Ubuntu Touch: https://ubports.com/donate |
Interview with TheKit
We had a little chat with TheKit, who is known in the UBports community for his porting efforts.
TheKit has been active in the UBports community even before Canonical terminated the Ubuntu Touch project. He's working on improving Halium and as a result has ported some Xiaomi devices to Ubuntu Touch to test his improvements.
Asked about what advice he would give to people who want to port devices to Ubuntu Touch, TheKit answers: "If you want to port a new device, try to become familiar with the UBports Porting and Halium groups on Telegram. Don't be afraid, state a device you want to port, together with its codename and the earliest Android stock version it got released with. This information will help people in those groups to understand if it's something feasible to port in the first place. And maybe they can send you a link to relevant information or any prior attempts."
TheKit also talks about his work on Halium 11, his dream of minimal device-specific adaptations and his interests outside of Ubuntu Touch. Read the full interview on our blog: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/interview-with-thekit-3784
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 110Alfred, Marius and Dalton were the hosts of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 110 session. They talked about some kernel changes and about the continuity of the UBports project. Nikita added WireGuard support to the Volla Phone's kernel, and Alfred did the same for the Sony Xperia X and Google Pixel 3a. So on those three devices you can now use the WireGuard VPN on the command line. Alfred also added exFAT support for the Xperia X and Pixel 3a and proposed the same kernel patch for the Volla Phone repository. This increases the maximum allowed capacity of the SD card you put in your phone, as well as the maximum file size. One of the questions in the Q&A session was: "What happens if developer 'X' gets hit by a bus?" or more generally "What if a principal contributor goes missing in action for a while?" We all have a life in the 'real world', with school, work, a family. Those breaks in continuity are unavoidable, and all volunteer organizations struggle with it. The only real solution is to have other people step up and do the work needed at those times. UBports is a completely open project and you don't need anyone to authorize or instruct your involvement. We value all inputs, big or small. You can watch the whole session and read our notes here: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-110-3783
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