I just got Ubuntu Touch running on an old Nexus 7 (2013) tablet and the process was really smooth, so great work on that! I am trying to programmatically turn on and off the display. I realized it was not running X so tried looking at Mir and Unity8 documentation but it's not clear how I can do that, compared to xset dpms force on/off in X. Thanks in advance!

@doniks Thanks, I'll have to take a closer look at the pine phone! Btw I tried service lightdm start and service lightdm stop which does technically turn on and off the display but it also kills everything else and takes time to start. What I was looking for was the instant on/off of just the display, like when a phone responds to a proximity sensor to toggle the display. Thanks for the suggestion anyway! I'm sure there's a way, I just don't know enough about Mir/Unity8 to dig deeper without docs which I can't seem to find or some sense of where to look in the source code.

@doniks I didn't initially think about the design of UT but once I had to start poking around it makes a lot of sense. It is a really cool platform and I'm looking forward to something like the isolated-containers-by-default model making it to my mainstream devices.

I was able to set up my own chroot using debootstrap without affecting the rest of the system. I installed nodejs and got a server running, etc.. So, this would at least let me have a way to trigger the display on and off if I figure out how to do that. I'll try playing with lightdm later but by my reading so far it seems like it just has hooks to delegate that work to something else, like xset on X.

My biggest fail so far was that I didn't realize the cameras wouldn't actually be v4l devices so I'll have to look at how the default Camera app is accessing the cameras through the Android HAL.

I guess it's back to the drawing board for now...

@dobey I am also looking into making a chroot. Is that still advisable and are there any recent instructions? I really just want to be able to do whatever I want with the device, including the cameras and microphone, using some deb packages like motion and nodejs

@UniSuperBox makes sense! Thank you

@AppLee @Lakotaubp Sorry, I am not used to Discourse so I thought News was a special area not just another topic. I read the guidelines and didn't think this was a question about porting or bugs. It is a question about Mir/Unity8 and how can one interact with it if they are used to X server. Anyway thanks for the civil heads up!

@dobey I was assuming it'd be a command that I ran via ssh outside of the contained area. I want to be able to turn on and off my device screen remotely. Do you need any more details?

@Lakotaubp sorry, I thought the News area where I posted was a different type of thing. Not used to Discourse. Thanks for the heads up!

I just got Ubuntu Touch running on an old Nexus 7 (2013) tablet and the process was really smooth, so great work on that! I am trying to programmatically turn on and off the display. I realized it was not running X so tried looking at Mir and Unity8 documentation but it's not clear how I can do that, compared to xset dpms force on/off in X. Thanks in advance!

I just got Ubuntu Touch running on an old Nexus 7 (2013) tablet and the process was really smooth, so great work on that! I am trying to programmatically turn on and off the display. I realized it was not running X so tried looking at Mir and Unity8 documentation but it's not clear how I can do that, compared to xset dpms force on/off in X.