Ubuntu Touch Q&A 22
New name, new face, new info!

 
 
 

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Shownotes

Special Guest

Who is Will Atwood Anyway?

Will Atwood is a member and representative of the UBAM Group. Will is a long-time free software advocate who was interested in aircraft and motorcycles. After choosing to focus on safer hobbies, Will got involved with CyanogenMod, WebOS, and now Ubuntu Touch. Will is an active part of the community thanks to the Welcoming Team.

UBAM stands for UB Amazing. This group acts as a Community Steering Committee. The goal is to improve communication and relationships within the community and support the foundation.

If you want to join shout out anywhere.

News

New Name

The UBports Community Update has now been officially renamed as the Ubuntu Touch Q&A. This Q&A will focus on technical updates while the Ubuntu Touch Audiocast and Ubuntu Touch News Desk will cover the general chatter in the community.

Events

UBports will be at a number of live events this year including:

  • Chemnitz Linux Days : Jan will be there.
  • Munich Meetup : This will be mostly a German-speaking event, but all are welcome.
  • Ubucon Europe : Marius will be giving a talk and doing a live porting of a new device. Jan will also be giving a talk.

Unity 8

That has been work to get Unity 8 on desktop and get it to state as a daily driver on both phone and desktop. That way we can have a coordinated effort on both sides. The Unity 8 project has merged with Yunit from which translations were borrowed. The project will continue under the name Unity 8. It's important for both the desktop and mobile experiences to be perfect in order to have true convergence.

We will need more help with Unity 8. We are looking for people who are experienced with with QT, QML, or Unity 8 itself. We also need documentation, and instructions how to get started.

Anbox

There has been some work. It goes slowly because of the Xenial main focus. You can't run Anbox without Xenial. So we must put the horse before the cart.

Marius made a modified Anbox binder, so it doesn't interfere with the android layer. It can be compiled as a kernel module, so you can deliver Anbox without a re-flash. It will also make porting a lot easier. Anbox has direct GL rendering. Candy Crush runs smoothly. It runs in an LXD (confined) container, but it's not a virtual machine. The finished product of Anbox will be like an app from the open store. Working on getting the Ubuntu Keyboard to work in Anbox just like it would in most apps.

16.04 is still a higher priority.

16.04

Fixing small things that make it not a daily driver. Some work done with Mir. Marius demonstrated 16.04 as daily driver with Anbox (in multiple windows). Using it as a daily driver is a good way to find bugs, but it's not ready for everyone.

There will be no change logs for the daily images. It would be too time consuming right now at this point. But you can watch the github commit logs for more details, or look at the github kanban. We want the change logs to be user friendly. If anyone has a script to share to grab commits from repositories, then that would be great.

Questions

Libertine - LibreOffice

Xenial will be better and will have improvements for desktop applications like LibreOffice

Devices Support

Come to Ubucon for a live demo on how to port.

Porting is easier with Halium(https://docs.halium.org). You port Halium, and then run UT on it. You find something called Halium Boot that Dalton has been working on, but it's still a moving target. Read the UBports docs as well

How does Libertine work right now?

Libertine runs X11 app in container, but you can also run X11 natively. Xmir Helper app can help you run these things on Xenial.

Stats

Stats.ubports.com was highly inaccurate. We can wipe the data and let it count again.

Specify a Download folder for the browser

This requires changes to the browser. It shouldn't be a huge task.

Closing Words

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UBUNTU TOUCH NEWS DESK 180212
February 12, 2018