Ubuntu Touch Q&A 38

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 38

On OTA-6

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Show Notes

News

OTA-5

OTA-5 is now out. Morph browser is the standout feature of that. It's got newer Chromium and it's smooth and fast. Netflix is potentially supported but we need to do a bit more work to enable that.

Kirigami & Qt

Kirigami widgets and Qt auto-scaling have been added to the distribution. Auto-scaling is a fairly good implementation, before precise scaling is specified in an app Qt apps are possible now. We have a couple already in OpenStore. More will hopefully arrive.

Upgrades from OTA-4

We have new default message tone and ringtone. If upgrading from 15.04 those sounds will be there but not be marked as defaults.
QtPIM has been upgraded, so alarms and synchronization will now work properly.
Date is now correct. For example it now shows correctly on the update page.
External display scaling works in convergence.
Should users hold back from browser upgrade to avoid losing tabs? No, just bookmark all of your open tabs, as all bookmarks will be transferred across

On OTA-6

The changelog will develop over the next week. Making permissions dialogs in the browser work etc. Other browser optimizations, especially hardware optimizations. OTA-6 will be relatively small and mostly tidying with stuff that was not quite ready in time for OTA-5

Any Pro5 that came with Android is not supported for simple upgrade to OTA-5. It can be done by altering the partitions. See the forum for that information.

When Oxide is removed it will release a large amount of space from the image. It is by far the biggest single component

Mid November is the target for OTA-6

We are proposing to change the way we do releases. Security updates and minor fixes are very slow in coming because everything is delayed until the next big release. We plan to automate the process, so a stable release lags rc by a set number of days. We already do that with devel to rc. It is an automatic process but can be halted if necessary. More details on the discussion can be found in our forum.

So, updates would be more frequent but of course with fewer changes each time.

A Telegram sprint will take place in Vienna to speed up introduction of the new Telegram API by meeting up and working together on the developer issues.

Already at least 10 people have agreed to attend, who will code together on that weekend

There will be photos etc of the event

If you have any similar imaginative ideas, just organize something and post an announcement to the forum. You can present your proposal live on Q&A if you want!

Support and donation message

LiberaPay - seems you can now pay by Paypal and by Stripe.

Questions

What are the top needs of the UT project right now?

Developers, developers, developers!!!!!

There is a link for sorting out minor bugs. You can get a free tee shirt from DigitalOcean for Hacktoberfest if you make 5 contributions in the month of October.

'Good first issue' and 'help wanted' are terms we use for fairly simple problems that beginners can work on. The latter category is slightly more complicated.

We need to grow our developer team. That is vital for the future of the project.

For example, reboots when Unity 8 crashes are still an annoyance. These may be minor but they create a very unprofessional impression. They undermine our reputation and we need to deal with those problems.

Documentation is not a complete answer to these problems. It helps but hands on is the best answer.

If there are obstacles to troubleshooting these minor bugs, let us know. otherwise we can't come up with a solution.

From a beginner perspective, the first step when porting is to go to Halium and get that working for your device.

We need to get testing better organized. At the moment it is very ad hoc and we need to structure it more formally. This ties in with the new release process. If we have automatic channel updates we will have to be more rigorous about the testing regime. Join the testing Telegram group for that or go to the Matrix equivalent group.

How do you use the subtitles of YouTube for other languages?

Seems to be a system to do that in desktop. So on UT you could probably switch to Desktop version and get it in Morph browser.

(Aside) Adria is from the Sardinian group. UT still does not have that language. We asked Qt about the upstream. it is not supported there yet, as ISO assignment is normally based on a country and Sardinian has no official country. Qt will update later in the year. That should enable us to proceed. At the moment the only way we can do this is by creating a language pack - a system we inherited from Canonical. Our needs are different, so we would like to get rid of language packs altogether. Maybe incorporate the languages directly. Newsflash! The day before the Q&A, Unicode updated its specification to include Sardinian.