| Hello community!Welcome to the UBports Foundation email newsletter, September 17, 2021 |
From your editorA couple of months ago, in a message on the Linux Kernel Mailing List directed at a Huawei employee, Linux kernel developer Qu Wenruo suggested that Huawei could work on "more upstream phone/tablet support". He felt sad that less than a dozen phones/tablets have upstream kernel support, and he found it frustrating that many of them are pretty old. "If you guys can change the trend, it would be wonderful", he said.
Wenruo's message got shared recently by TuxPhones, and I find the topic important enough to share it here too.
Upstream support in the Linux kernel for a phone or tablet means that the device could be natively supported by mobile Linux distributions. It means that the device could be ported to Ubuntu Touch without having to use the Android hardware abstraction layer Halium, such as is the case now with the PinePhone and PineTab. It means that you don't depend anymore on the manufacturer's out-of-tree drivers, which could block you from using a newer kernel. And thanks to the quality control of the Linux kernel developers, your phone would work faster, more reliable and more secure.
This is also an advantage for the phone manufacturer. It frees the company's developers from having to change their kernel code every time the upstream kernel changes. So they get more time to work on the important stuff.
I hope many more mobile device manufacturers will invest in upstream support for their phones or tablets in the Linux kernel. Maybe this will make 2022 the year of the Linux phone.
Koen Vervloesem
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News hot from the pressThere was a call for testing for Ubuntu Touch OTA-19 this week. The release of OTA-19 is right around the corner. Halium 7.1 and 5.1 devices have now access to gyroscope and magnetic field sensors. In the messaging app the keyboard no longer pops up automatically. And as always a lot of bugs have been fixed. Clickable now has a Godot template which ships a Godot engine compatible with Ubuntu Touch. All you need to do is put your PCK file (resource pack) from Godot in the right place. Kudos to @abmyii for this, he worked for months on this daunting task! Make sure you have the latest Clickable Docker images for this to work (clickable update). Godot is a free and open source 2D and 3D game engine, so expect some more games to appear for Ubuntu Touch soon.
Apps in the spotlight
Here are some new Ubuntu Touch apps to try out, selected by Mateo Salta and presented in the latest Q&A session: WireGuard VPN by David Ventura is an app to connect to a VPN using the WireGuard protocol. Its offers a kernel implementation (if supported by your kernel) as well as a userspace implementation. KeePass by David Ventura allows you to view your passwords in a KeePass file. You can synchronize the password database with your Nextcloud server using an app like ubsync.
You can find these apps on the OpenStore.
| Help needed!If you have some spare time, we could use some help in the following domains: The development of the Focal-based Ubuntu Touch is progressing. A lot of attention has been given recently to system settings and indicators. If you'd like to help in testing, try the Platform Development Kit (PDK). Alfred's experiments with Miracast support in Ubuntu Touch led him to a mismatch between the 64-bit rootfs and the 32-bit media process on the Halium side. If anybody out there has a particular insight into the detail of that handover and would like to help, please get in touch with Alfred.
Help us move beyond Ubuntu 20.04Our UBports community is growing. We have a lot of volunteers, but for some specific tasks we need to hire specialists. The move to the Ubuntu 20.04 base is such a task.
With Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa), you'll be able to run more applications, especially if they only support the Wayland protocol for its user interface. This will make it easier to port desktop apps to run on your phone.
The move to systemd and the support of Wayland will also make Ubuntu Touch more compatible under the hood with other Linux distributions. This will foster collaboration with other mobile Linux distributions such as Mobian, especially on non-Android devices such as the PinePhone.
The move to 20.04 is a must to keep getting security updates and improvements for the base packages. The sooner the upgrade has happened, the sooner the UBports developers are able to work on new features such as playing videos protected by DRM and video calling with WebRTC in the browser.
If every member donated $10 a month for some time, this would give a major boost to our growing community.
Donate here so we can hire developers for a better Ubuntu Touch: https://ubports.com/donate |
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 108Marius, Florian and Alfred were the hosts of the Ubuntu Touch Q&A 108 session. They talked about OTA-19 and OTA-20 and about experiments with Miracast display mirroring.
With OTA-19 right around the corner, OTA-20 is already under discussion. One long expected feature is the ability to import pre-configured VPN settings, so you don't need a cumbersome manual setup anymore for your VPN connections. In OTA-20 it should be possible to generate a configuration file for a particular VPN service on your computer and then transfer that to your Ubuntu Touch phone to get your VPN connection running. Other improvements discussed for OTA-20 are fixes to the trust store and notifications with vibrations on Halium 9 and 10 devices.
Alfred has been experimenting on his Pixel 3a with Miracast, a technology to mirror your phone's display to a TV display or computer monitor over Wi-Fi. He has tried two different approaches, one using GStreamer and another one using droidmedia directly. This has exposed some bugs and has been illuminating to Alfred. He's working on a fix now, and he expects it to be ready before the move to 20.04.
You can watch the whole session and read our notes here: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-news-1/post/ubuntu-touch-q-a-108-3778 |
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