Why does UT not have assisted GPS?

projectmoon

@Mario.CH By free, I mean you can change a config value in the geoclue config to point to BeaconDB, and it will work (insofar as their data is accurate), and no one will send you a bill.

Edit: And BeaconDB has been around for a few years now, so their coverage is actually quite good in denser areas.

flohack

@projectmoon well ok then, just needs someone that implements it then

RapidRotator

@flohack Atm it's quite busy because of the year-end with my kids (school, music performances, etc.), but between Christmas and new year I can remount the needed directories writeable and see if I can install and configure mmcli and geoclue to see if I can get those working on UT

flohack

@RapidRotator that would be great. I guess its not so straightforward but maybe we are lucky

gpatel-fr

@RapidRotator

while I'm no expert, I am taking a fleeting interest in these questions currently, and I can point you to an ooooold doc emerging from the mist of times:

https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/questing/man2/lomiri-location-service.2.html

you'll notice that at some pre-historical point, the lomiri location service was written to allow to inject geoclue data into location info provided to applications. Is it still the case now, I have no idea. Looking at the service daemon command line (using ps) it's clear that it is not configured to do so currently.
I don't have the energy to try to hack the service to change the startup parameters accordingly - my hopes that it would just work are very low (if it was so easy, why would the UT devs not have done it already ?)

Eric H

@flohack I quickly tested Geoclue on Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.x/daily with success.

Setup
- I installed geoclue-2-demo and its dependencies via apt (without recommended or suggested packages).
- I modified Geoclue’s configuration to use Positon
```
[wifi]
enable=true
url=https://api.positon.xyz/v1/geolocate?key=test
```
  I also tested BeaconDB using:
```
url=https://beacondb.net/v1/geolocate
```
Test
To verify it worked:
I started the agent in the background:
```
/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent &
```
Then I ran the test command:
```
 /usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/where-am-i
```
Results
With Positon: obtained a fix very quickly (~5 s). The coordinates are correct.
With BeaconDB: the fix is also quick, but the returned coordinates are incorrect.

Note: @vlad-nirky ran the same test on 24.04-2.x and reported similar results.

Eric H

Since a Geoclue2 plugin for Qt is preinstalled with Ubuntu Touch, I tested it as well.

Setup

I modified GPS ToolKit to use Geoclue2 instead of lomiri-location.
I disabled GPS ToolKit’s apparmor confinement.

Test

I started the Geoclue agent in the background from a terminal set to "prevent app suspension":
/usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent &
I launched GPS ToolKit.

Result
I obtain fixes within a few seconds (~5 s).

gpatel-fr

@Eric-H said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

With Positon: obtained a fix very quickly (~5 s). The coordinates are correct.

from https://positon.xyz/docs/

We currently do not expect to continue our operations beyond the year 2025

Eric H

@gpatel-fr said in Why does UT not have assisted GPS?:

We currently do not expect to continue our operations beyond the year 2025

Yes, Positon is intended as a temporary offering.
Please note that I do not recommend using Positon, BeaconDB, or even Geoclue 2 — I am only testing them

matteo

@Eric-H thanks for your pointer and feature testing. What you did seems very encouraging and may eventually fill this long standing lack of UT. I hope this will lead to some sort of integration specifically with PureMaps. Let's see what it gets.