News and Update
Alfred and Marius presented.
New improvements
Documentation is now available to porters for our encryption procedures. There are various commands and settings which need to be taken care of.
The first main release of Noble is scheduled for around the middle of September.
A new feature will be light and dark modes for apps and full shell.
Marius has been doing some tinkering. His work on eSIM now put it in the testing mode. It will probably not be released as a stable offer in the first version of Noble. Along with Wushan and Guido he has been doing some more work on the Qt6 browser. That two is now in a testing stage.
Marius
has been fixing some bugs with
VoLTE and
experimenting with voice over Wi-Fi.
He
is trying to get it into userspace.
That
is interesting because it will then be possible in theory to trick a
device which is not
VoLTE enabled
to think that the voice
over
Wi-Fi is that input.
In effect it
falls back on a classic
SIP connection.
OpenStore apps
ChromiumOSguy has brought over the Fluffychat web application. That is a Matrix app.
Marius mentioned that he has been working on Fluffer, a native Matrix client.
ChromiumOSguy has also been working on UBdious-port which is a front hand for the Invidious interface with YouTube.
They have also created uWolf which is a browser based on LibreWolf.
Amazfish is a smart watch companion which has also seen some improvements. Thanks to Josef for that.
BookWurm for Bible studies has been updated
The classic UT game dropping letters has been brought over.
Spreadsheet app has been tidied up.
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.
Using SnapsVlad has tried loading some Snaps but could not get Keypass XC to work. There is a linked blog on the website which discusses how to run Snaps and indicates those which run well and those which don’t seem to run at all.
Marius has been working on some subsurface patches and Alfred has been refining those to extend the functionality of Snaps
Alfred tried out the Keypass XC app on the Jingpad and it worked, so it looks like there is some kind of hardware issue. If logs from testing are provided that will help us to figure out the problem. The chipset is what we are interested in not so much the device.
Deb packages and read-only filesystem
Dev Evil asked a question which has been asked many times before which is why we can’t just install debs in the rootfs. This is because our system is designed for ordinary users and critical systems so stability is an absolute priority. If you can write, you will mess up that stability.
What you can do is to install Snaps because they are largely free-standing.
Of course Devel channel can break which is why it is not suitable for everyday use but Stable will always deliver in an emergency situation.
Overlay policy and encryption
There was a question about the overlay policy with encryption. There are two versions of the kernel, A and B. Below 5.4 there is one policy and above there is a different policy.
Up to 5.4 only the user space has access. Not even root has it. After 5.4 the key goes in the file space and is accessible to all users. This means that Docker and SSH are unaffected.
Docker for development
There was a question about running Docker natively for development. This is something which Alfred has been playing around with. It needs not only the Snap install but some configuration changes but then it seems to work out of the box. it actually isn’t quite that straightforward because most devices will also require some kernel tweaking.
Unfortunately, the Snap version of Docker does not have network access. Nftable and IPtable don’t work as they should.
Of course Waydroid still exists so there is a possibility of running Docker as an android app in that.
Arubislander put in a word for LXD containers in UT. Alfred agreed that they work very well.
Marius added the fun fact that all of us use LXD containers regularly because we place the android drivers inside an LXD container. It even extends to system services.
LXD allows nesting so you can run a container inside a container. Obviously that is then very unstable.
See you next time :-)