News

Ubuntu 16.04, Qt 5.9

We've been doing a lot of work on our Sudoku project this week. You can read more about the project in the Community Update 14 blog post. This week, we're happy to report that the system and apps can be built against Qt 5.9... and BOY is it fast!

16.04 images are still not ready for general use, but we're happy to see more progress via Sudoku than we had with the old method of upgrading to 16.04.

Canonical recently stopped allowing new packages to be added to PPAs for 15.04, which has lit a bit of a fire under us to get on 16.04 as soon as possible. For now, we are building images using our own repositories at repo.ubports.com.

Marius gave a live demo of 16.04 convergence at 00:22:15. Note that no app was recompiled or edited for 16.04, yet most of them work out of the box.

OTA-3

We've triaged quite a few bugs for OTA-3 that should be more realistic than the previous expectations.

Some neat fixes that have already landed in RC include...

• New FP2 screen module functions
• Cursor movement by dragging on spacebar
• Shell autocompletion

More QA

We're trying to make QA easier for developers. To this end, we're automatically building valid pull requests on select UBports repositories and pushing them to folders in our repository. We're also building up some QA scripts to make installing these packages easier.

We've also started setting up a QA team for more formal bug reporting, triaging, and testing of features. If you're interested in joining, please contact Jan, @neothethird on Telegram or e-mail jan (at) ubports dot com.

The Samsung thing

We've been getting a lot of links to the new "Linux on Galaxy" project on Samsung phones. Nothing is released yet, but initial documents seem to show that this is similar to the Maru OS approach where everything is separated. It's not particularly interesting to us at the moment.

Questions

Have all apps from the Ubuntu store moved to the OpenStore?

No. We aren't planning on just throwing every app (many unmaintained) from the Ubuntu Store into the OpenStore. We still ask that you request your favorite app developers to start maintaining and moving their app to the OpenStore.

Can the OpenStore go into the large space that the Ubuntu tore takes up?

No. That icon type is reserved for scopes, and the OpenStore is not a scope. The Ubuntu Store is really a very advanced scope and not an app. The OpenStore is an app and will most likely stay that way.

Will you change your Patreon goal since your last one was sponsored?

This question comes from our Patreon goal for $2000 being "This will allow us to rent beefy ARM64 build servers to make ci.ubports.com faster than ever[...]". Instead, when we tried to get into negotiations to rent a server, we received one at no charge thanks to the Works on ARM project.

To answer the question, no. Changing the text of a goal will probably send an e-mail to all of our patrons and cause more questions than it answers. However, that doesn't mean that our plans for the money are set in stone. The funds that we receive go toward paying Marius full time as well as hosting costs, shipping devices to developers, and other day-to-day costs. We try to be transparent about how we're using it, and we don't believe that we're wasting your money in any way. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve, please get in contact with us.

A majority of our costs (including that for the time of some community members) are still paid by sponsors and not Patreon, and for that we are grateful.

Security updates

People have been asking about the KRACK and BlueBorne vulnerabilities lately, and for good reason. These are highly public explots. Both have been fixed in the RC and Devel channels, with the fixes landing in Stable with the next OTA.