Shownotes
00:05:00 Ubuntu Touch 16.04 Test Builds are shipping
00:08:05 Plasma Mobile with Bhushan
00:14:05 Changing gears back to Xenial test builds
00:16:06 Flo is back! (then back to Xenial)
00:17:56 Yunit News
00:20:16 Ubuntu Touch 16.04 show and tell
00:21:20 Back to Yunit News
00:22:30 The new UBports Get Involved page
00:28:55 OTA-2 Status Update
00:31:31 Will you try to reach an agreement to gain the Android source for BQ or Meizu devices?
00:34:30 Raving about convergence
00:43:00 Which device do you think I should buy for Ubuntu Touch?
00:44:30 Which device do you think I should buy for Plasma Mobile?
00:46:12 Super secret question
00:48:50 Will there be updates to prepare for 16.04?
00:50:02 Will there be a new flagship for Ubuntu Touch?
The rest is winding down.
We held our latest Community Update on July 22nd, 2017. You can watch it here The Community Update is a great chance for community members to come in, hang out, and get some questions answered. If that sounds like fun to you (and it should!), you should definitely be watching the General category in our forum for the next one!
This week we were joined by Bhushan Shah, developer of Plasma Mobile and Halium.
Without any further ado, let's get into our news and questions.
Halium News with Bhushan
The recent work in Halium has been making the stock Rootfs - which developers install on their devices to test Halium functionality - work with some new devices. There has also been progress on packaging Halium bits for different operating systems, which thus far has not been going very well.
Work has also been done on the task of creating a new version of Halium for Android 7.1, which will allow savvy porters to get the future Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch 16.04 working on their newer devices. The Nexus 5 and 5X are the initial "starting point" devices for Halium 7.1.
Marius from the UBports project has mainly been working on making Halium work with our new Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial-based operating system. This includes refining Halium itself so it suits our use case. We're also working on making our Continuous Integration infrastructure build Halium and Ubuntu Touch 16.04.
To help with Halium, be sure to get a hold of the project via #halium on Freenode, their Telegram channel (linked on their website), or the Matrix channel #halium:matrix.org. These are all bound together with Matrix, so just pick the one you like!
Ubuntu Touch 16.04 "Almost kinda" Works
Some of our more vigilant users have noticed that there are 16.04 images appearing on our system-image server for the Nexus 5. Please don't install them unless you're trying to debug the low-level bits of the OS. We've managed to get Unity 8 starting (until it stops) and most of the phone hardware can be accessed using the command line. However, Ubuntu Touch 16.04 is not ready for everyday use.
If you aren't using your phone as a daily driver and want to help us develop, check out the instructions for installing and hacking it here
Plasma News with Bhushan
At this point we gave Bhushan the floor to talk a bit about Plasma Mobile.
Because Plasma Mobile has gone through several low-level changes in its lifetime, it is not quite ready for daily driver use. The user interface hasn't been given as much love as it should, so it is really meant for developers who want to further the Plasma Mobile platform.
Marius stated that anyone who is truly interested in the alternative operating system space for Android phones should give Plasma Mobile a try on a spare phone.
If you'd like to get involved with Plasma Mobile, check out the KDE Community Wiki. Plasma Mobile developers are also available via IRC in #plasma on Freenode.
Thanks, Sponsors!
We always need to take some time to thank our sponsors. They make Ubuntu Touch possible.
Thank you to all of our Patrons as well as Digital Ocean, Private Internet Access, and most graciously, Smoose.
Also, thanks everyone who makes one-time Paypal or Bitcoin donations! We never forget about you all.
Yunit News
John Salatas of Yunit has been working hard on packaging Yunit and rebuilding it with Qt 5.9.
We've asked to see Yunit built with Qt 5.9 so we can gain performance improvements for the ARM platforms and QtQuick2 (which makes writing apps much faster).
It's also possible to use Vanilla QtCreator downloaded from the Qt website with Yunit. Maybe in the future it'll be easy to download this upstream tool and make Ubuntu Touch apps with it.