News and Update
Marius, AppLee and Alfred presented.
VoLTE
Marius announced that VoLTE is now working satisfactorily for both Mediatek and Qualcomm. The modifications are already in the image for both Focal and Noble. With that said in order to use them the porter for each device must do the work on that and for Qualcomm the only device we have at the moment is the Fairphone 5. On the Mediatek side, Volla from 22 up are functional. Marius and Alfred have been running it as a daily driver for awhile and have found no major problems.
This is not just voice it is also SMS over VoLTE. AppLee reported some issues with MMS but Marius was surprised that MMS would work at all because it is a different type of protocol. Alfred attempted to test that out live but like most live attempts it didn’t work. Alfred also placed a call though and that did work.
Alfred and Marius both confirmed that the indicator was showing VoLTE on their phones.
In other big news, it is now possible to download apps for Noble from the OpenStore and it will detect which system you are on.
The only thing holding Marius back from running Noble as daily driver was that he was still testing out VoLTE for Focal. Noble is good enough to be used though. It is now pretty much on a par with Focal and the only outstanding issue was with push notifications and there is a fix for those in the works.
More news
Guido has completely rebuilt the notifications stack with more modern versions of Go.
In yet more big news, Marius has now succeeded in getting an eSIM to work. At the moment it functions only in command line but he is working on a UI for it. The fix used the Lpac library. A big shout out to the developers of that because it contains resources which we have used for lots of different things.
Alfred has submitted some changes which allow some multimedia to work through USB-C. There is no call audio at the moment and we are still working on how audioHAL needs to be configured so that call audio can be used. We want PulseAudio to detect when a USB cable is connected and sort out the routing automatically. This is an area where someone with particular expertise will be able to help us work out the details. Please get in touch with Alfred if you can assist.
Qt6 integration continues to go well and of course that will be helpful for Morph browser.
With Lomiri we now have Mir 2.20 working on the desktop. On the phone image, we are still shipping Mir 1.8. You can already download it from the Lomiri PPA and it shouldn’t be too long before we have Mir parity on the phone.
Marius confirmed to a questioner that both VoLTE and eSIM will have entries in Settings.
OpenStore apps
It is not new to UT but iPixelFed has been revived for Focal. It is a client for the image based Fediverse environment known as Pixelfed. Thanks, go to Uzan for that.
Vpradio is also new.
Daniel has been working on a fork of CinnyUT which is a Matrix client. Matrix has add-ons which can interface with Signal and WhatsApp. This ability of Matrix could be quite useful. it is worth noting that if you have two versions of Cinny installed at the same time you will have difficulties logging in. Clear the cache of the first and you should have no problems.
DeltaTouch has had some more work. This is our client for the DeltaChat network.
There are some refinement to uPiano the miniature piano app. Thanks to Andrej for that.
Flow has been updated. It is our unofficial client for Deezer. Sander has been working on that.
Luksus has been working on Fahrplan which is a transport app.
DisCO2very is an app to show carbon footprint. It is from Fla.
Luksus also worked on MensaMax, a German school lunch manager.
Uzan maintains uRSSes which is an RSS app.
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.
Disc encryption
Tera noted that all of the attention has been on developing Noble recently. With that coming to an end, can more attention be given to developing full disc encryption? We have done some experiments on Focal, to look at encrypting user data by singling out the Home folder. Our basis was f2fs encryption. It was an abstract experiment though because it didn’t take account of our user set up. It would not work for us if we had to create a special UI and a special on stream keyboard just for managing the decryption. We would want a pin unlock which at the same time decrypts the Home folder.We use the partitioning layout from the vendor so system and user data split so there is no way that full disc encryption would be possible. We have systemd/HomeD so we would not have to rely on f2s which is a Google facility.
Although we would like encryption, we always find ourselves in the situation where there is something that is immediately more important. The most practical way forward on this is through a partner such as Volla or FairPhone.
Halium 12 devices upgrade
Alagiralagir had a couple of questions. The first was to ask why all devices can’t be upgraded to Halium 12 so that they can take advantage of VoLTE? Alfred is the porter of the Pixel 3a but he expressed his view that the device has outlived it’s usefulness. It runs on Halium 9. It is not worth the effort of taking it further and there is not even a guarantee that Halium 12 would unlock VoLTE. There are times when the only way forward is to get a more modern phone and this is one of those times.The Pixel 3a is not supported in Austria anymore, even if it is running the original Android. Time to let it go.
They also asked about the TELEports app which does not work in Noble at the moment. The problem here is that uses the module OpenSSL1 which ships with Focal. In Noble we have OpenSSL3 and it is not compatible. We will be adding OpenSSL1 to the image to correct this.
Ghostcloud based apps have exactly the same problem and they will be fixed in the same way.
How to help
Ida asks what enthusiastic non-techies can do to support UBports?Helping with translations is certainly something a lot of people can do. One simple human thing you can do is to thank contributors for what they do. It is always nice to receive a compliment and that is motivating. You can spread the word about UBports on social media or with friends and other places. You contact government and organisations and argue that they should sponsor what we are doing. Quality assurance is something you can do without any special skills.
You just need to check out the ordinary usage of the phone in a structured way and feedback whether things are working correctly. There is also a role for administration. We have an organisation to run and moderators looking after Telegram groups. If we are going to make more use of Mastodon and Matrix we need volunteers to take care of that.
Smart watch with UT
Kristoffer asked in the live chat about the hardware requirements for a smart watch if it was to run UT? it should have at least 2 GB of RAM and be a modern smart watch like the Pixel Watch 2. It would need a built completely from scratch. Even so it is not impossible.DisplayPort, Aethercast
Kristoffer also asked whether HDMI operates via USB irrespective of the type of device you have? Unfortunately, this is a hard dependent feature. It is not actually HDMI. The usual protocol is DisplayPort. Support for that is native to the UT image, but it can only work if the device supports it and if the porter has implemented that support.Aethercast is also in the image. If you have a Miracast type adapter this will allow you to use your device on a large screen in desktop mode. Some WebOS televisions have that sort of adapter built in.
See you next time :-)