News and Update
AppLee and Alfred presented.
Camera app news
The camera app has been updated and you can now choose whether to save EXIF information. For privacy it is set by default not to save that data.
For some reason with some cameras, the resolution was stuck at 720P. That has been fixed now and the resolution is native.
Encryptation news
The basic requirements for setting up encryption have landed. That includes FScrypt and its config files.
Startup is via Lomiri greeter. Entering your password will now take you to the real shell and decrypt. On some devices we still have some tweaking to do, but it is now working on Fairphone 5.
If you have that phone, please reach out to Alfred and he will explain how to do the setup.
Lomiri customization and other improvements
Lomiri has been tweaked so that the appearance of the Home button can be customized. This is mainly for Lomiri distributors.
Waydroid now works for Volla tablet.
Flashlight operation has been in the indicator bar until now, but the function has now been moved so that the switch can be operated from the system. Porters will be able to utilize this change.
OpenStore apps
Asteroid Revival is a clone of that game. Big thanks to Vincenzo for that.
Luksus has made some additions to the Music Recognition app.
The core apps have all seen a lot of work and most of that is probably in preparation for Noble.
Nymea have updated their IOT app.
Launcher Modular has stepped up to a newer framework and will do that again for Noble. Thanks again to SaveurLinux.
There has been an update to Flow which is an unofficial Deezer client from Sander.
Lothar has added a lot of refinements to Delta Chat, which uses email servers as the basis for a secure messenger.
Leon has continued work on UT Translator, an off-line language translator. Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to continue support for Pixel 3a XL.
FPfabi has put some more work into Todoist UT.
Alfred has done some more tweaking with Snaps, in particular for on-screen keyboards and to enable hardware acceleration using OpenGL. It works whether Lomiri is on the phone or on desktop.
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.
RCS messaging
Wally ask about RCS messaging and whether it could be implemented on UT? Actually on the Pixel 3a we had to disable an RCS utility because it was interfering with MMS. It is part of Halium but unused by us. Marius would have more idea about the possibilities. We will come back to it when he is around.Morph browser
Rdfrs asked about limitations of Morph browser for banking and other functions and whether progress can be made with that, to allow use as daily driver. The biggest problem with Morph browser is that it still works with a Qt5 base and that means it uses a very old version of chromium. We are continuing to work towards Qt6 and when we have that fully implemented, we will be able to switch to an updated version of chromium which will be able to do a lot of what you’re asking for.It is unlikely in the short term that we will have that more enabled browser embedded in the system but what should soon be possible is to be able to get a more modern version from OpenStore.
Noble
Vlad asked where Noble development releases are documented? They can be seen in the UBports Gitlab, by following merge requests. The Issue tracker is also there.Focal update, Noble transition, electron installer issues
Alagirialagiri asked several things. First, will there be another update for Focal or are we going straight to Noble? Some of the work on Noble is being back-ported to Focal so yes there will be some tidying up done. Noble isn’t very far away though so 20.04 OTA-9 will probably therefore be the last.There were some issues with electron in the installer on desktop and that was not working properly with Wayland. Marius has been trying to resolve that.
On the question about the kernel, the one used in Lomiri is maintained by Canonical and we will not be changing that.
UT for desktop
WeKan asked in the live chat whether there is UT for desktop? Not exactly but Lomiri is at the heart of UT and there is a desktop flavor which also has Lomiri integrated. Lomiri contains the core apps. The crossover also means that you can test some apps designed for UT using the desktop.Anyone who has a detailed knowledge of Gitlab is welcome to help us out with the management side of Gitlab, rather than with the development itself.
Lomiri running with Fedora
Jean-Luc asked to know more about Fedora running with Lomiri. The wiki page of the Fedora project has some details about that. Really, this is all about finding some people who have experience with Fedora packaging in order that we can get the team together to work on importing Lomiri into the Fedora archive.UT terminal
BWeKan also asked about the terminal in UT and why it goes out of memory so quickly on Fairphone 5? This is because of the very limited size of the rootfs. You need to be careful that you have not corrupted phabletdata and partially bricked your device. There are limitations on playing. The rootfs is small - about 3 GB - because it is not intended to be touched.Refinements
There was some confusion about Lomiri on desktop and an assumption that it was tied to the use of Snaps whereas Fedora uses Flatpaks. That isn’t true at all. Lomiri on desktop can use Flatpaks, In fact Ubuntu can use Flatpaks.We use the name Ubuntu Touch because it reflects history and we have decided to keep that link.
See you next time :-)