Help us with the Sony Xperia X
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Hi everyone,
I'm sorry to say that the maintainer for the Sony Xperia X (F5121) port, Alfred, has reached a critical point. He needs to stop his current volunteer positions. That includes his maintainership of the Xperia X port.
Many of you know Alfred. He's been one of the most important drivers of Halium 7.1 for well over a year. Working on the Xperia X port, he's found and fixed a great number of issues. His first ever was fixing the mount of
odmpartitions under Halium 7.1 by pulling in some upstream changes. He's gone on to propose or merge 24 changes to Halium and 25 changes to Ubuntu Touch... in addition to all of his work on the Xperia X-specific repositories.He's ported multiple apps from Sailfish to Ubuntu Touch, you can find them all on his OpenStore profile
Remember when the MX4 wasn't able to boot edge, and it seemed no one would figure it out? Alfred figured it out with this PR.
He's also joined us on multiple Q&A sessions, his first was Q&A 48, then he helped save my bacon on Q&A 56 and Jan's on Q&A 58. He also talked a bit more porting on Q&A 60.
Basically, what I'm saying is... He's a cool guy. If you have a development position open in Vienna, accept remote work, or you have a unicorn position working on Ubuntu Touch available, you need to stop reading this and send him to your HR manager.
What he really asked me to write this post for, though, was to call for maintainers for the Xperia X port. The port is close to completion, and relied on by a few in the community, but needs someone to take over.
Now, before you say "I can't do that, I'm not a developer," remember: I wasn't a developer three years ago either. Porting Ubuntu Touch sounds hard - it is hard - but most of the work for either a seasoned developer or a newbie is trying things until they work. Don't let your perceived inexperience stop you.
Alfred is minimally available to help you out, and of course the rest of the community is still here too. If you're interested and have a device, you can find the Halium information for the device at halium/projectmanagement#98, and you can find help via the getting community help section of the UBports Documentation. You can start whenever you like, message us whenever you like, or reply here if you're interested.
Thank you for your time.
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Even if it will be a non-UT-related job at the end... Enabling Halium 7.1 to be daily driver ready deserves a big thank you! My 10 Euro per month for at least one year are out. I hope everyone, using UT on the Xperia X out there, or maybe profiting otherwise from Alfreds Halium improvements, who are able to afford something, will follow.
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A huge thank you for all your efforts @fredldotme , hope you will find quickly a paid position ( hope one day fondation or donations can support you for working on UT ) and take a breathe before coming back to UT ;-).
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@fredldotme : Thank you for all the work you have done.
I have an Xperia X on which I have changed the charging port this week and want to flash UT on it this weekend.
I have started to learn python - I am not an IT guy - therefore I cant help on completing and maintaining the port for now, but what I can offer is that if someone wants to help to complete port I cant give this person (in Germany) my Xperia X.
By all means I will help to test it and if I can help in some other way I will do it gladly.The X is actually a good device. It would be great if the port could go on.
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Maybe it would be a good idea to post it on twitter (and maybe xda) as well?
How different is a port from UT to PlasmaMobile? I imagine they have their own workload and priorities but maybe they know someone who is interessted to develop it further.
