Hi Folks,

I will try to take you on a journey into Portingland, of which I once said it´s like a rabbit hole, making a bad quote from Alice in Wonderland.

On this endeavour I will be accompanied by other people from the community. It will be fun, full of Information and nobody knows where we are going to land.

We will start next week. Possible formats are blog style, small videos and podcasts. Let´s see! Your Feedback will be welcomed.

BR Florian

Hello Community,

We have decided to add this new section to our Forums, called UBports International. In this section, for now, you'll find the subsections for three different languages: Dutch, German and French.
We believe that this section will lower the language barrier for some existing and new forum members. It should allow more people to use the UBports Forum to ask and answer questions about Ubuntu Touch, stay in contact with the community and to get and give support with apps and the OS more freely.

These three languages were chosen because we have an existing user base made up by people who speak these languages, and importantly because we have moderators who are native speakers. In the future we will consider adding other languages, if both of these conditions are met. For now, we will start with these three so that we can see whether it works as expected.

Please remember that normal Form rules still apply to this section. So If you speak French, German or Dutch, Welcome... come in and say bonjour, guten Tag or hoi!

And to create some tension and excitement, I hope we are able to co-announce more hardware later this year

This is an upgrade port for the Nexus 5 core device. The current port uses classic porting on Android 5.1 with lots of band aids and mixture of blobs etc. The new port is on Halium 7.1 level.

Sources
Kernel: https://github.com/ubports/android_kernel_lge_hammerhead/tree/halium-7.1
Device: https://github.com/ubports/android_device_lge_hammerhead/tree/halium-7.1
Manifest: https://github.com/ubports/device-builds/blob/halium/lge_hammerhead.xml

Status

Working

• Actors: Manual brightness
• Actors: Notification LED
• Actors: Torchlight
• Actors: Vibration
• Cellular: Carrier info, signal strength
• Cellular: Data connection
• Cellular: Incoming, outgoing calls
• Cellular: MMS in, out
• Cellular: PIN unlock
• Cellular: SMS in, out
• GPU: Boot into UI
• Misc: Battery percentage
• Misc: Offline charging
• Misc: Online charging
• Misc: RTC time is used after reboot
• Misc: Shutdown / Reboot
• Network: Bluetooth
• Network: Flight mode
• Network: WiFi
• Sensors: Automatic brightness
• Sensors: GPS
• Sensors: Proximity
• Sensors: Rotation
• Sensors: Touchscreen
• Sound: Earphones
• Sound: Loudspeaker
• Sound: Microphone
• Sound: Volume control
• USB: External monitor

Working with additional steps

• Cellular: Voice in calls (Volume very low)

For camera, please follow the steps here: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/3257/how-to-test-gstreamer-droid-based-camera-support-in-ubuntu-touch-for-halium-7-1-based-port

• Camera: Flashlight
• Camera: Photo
• Camera: Switch between back and front camera

Not working

• Camera: Video
• Cellular: Change audio routings
• GPU: Video acceleration
• Misc: Anbox patches applied to kernel
• Misc: Recovery image
• Misc: Reset to factory defaults
• Network: Hotspot
• USB: MTP access
• USB: ADB access

Not tested:

• Endurance: Battery lifetime > 24h from 100%
• Endurance: No reboot needed for 1 week
• Misc: Wireless charging

Install:
Assuming you have already Ubuntu Touch installed. That means, the bootloader is unlocked and a UT recovery is in place. You need a Linux PC with adb and fastboot installed.

• You need the Android tool simg2img, e.g. from https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/devel/android-tools-fsutils or https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/simg2img
• Download halium-install from here: https://github.com/JBBgameich/halium-install/releases (Click on Assets and download the standalone script)
• Download the kernel and system image from here: http://twoot.bin.org.in/nextcloud/index.php/s/873qT7twZ6tXPqb
• Download the latest rootfs image from here: https://ci.ubports.com/job/xenial-rootfs-armhf/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/out/ubports-touch.rootfs-xenial-armhf.tar.gz
• Bring your device into bootloader mode (long-press Vol-Down and Power until bootloader menu appears)
• Issue fastboot flash boot halium-boot.img
• Select Recovery with the volume keys and confirm with power button
• After device has booted, issue halium-install-standalone.sh -p ut ubports-touch.rootfs-xenial-armhf.tar.gz system.img
• halium-install will ask for your host´s sudo password first. This is normal and no security leak!
• Then it will also ask for an SSH/phablet user password to set on the device
• Issue adb reboot

Now the device should boot into the new system.

So as one of the Q&A frequent passengers a few words...

• Yes once per month could work for the moment. I guess the announcements can still fit into that timeframe
• We were often struggling with long questions, and "4 questions in 1" posts, that are hard to answer since they jeopardize time for other questions. Its not easy to be fair with that. But a little bit of filtering could be good, and maybe we indicate which question will make it into Q&A ahead.
• We are lacking now a host with good command of English language. A native speaker will be preferred I think. Suggest someone
• The Q&A is run with a few tools that make it kinda easy. Though, a few days before and on the evening at least one hour before you should focus on preparations
• YouTube is a must still since a) it has the best connectivity for all people listening b) it automatically stores the recordings and c) our team can then do postprocessing for audio-only and text transcription.
• Good relation with marketing team: They need to know in advance when the next show will happen.
  THats all so far. There will be Q&As coming, I have a guest for one of the next ones for example, so its not dead in the water

I am against any move until we see a negative impact for us. We got over 300 repos hosted on Github now, and Infrastructure is already now under pressure with keeping up with open work items. Moving now, not even when the deal is dry, without seeing any policy changes is overreacted IMHO. We want to finish OTA-4, and when we start moving to Gitlab now you can forget any release at end of June, or even longer.

After OTA-4 we can review this again. But I strictly disagree on any fast reaction now.

Hello everyone,
in order to better understand what´s important for you when it comes to mobile device features please help me and answer the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/8YRKL95 - we want to set minimum quality levels for ports and therefore need to know what makes a good device nowadays.

Thanks Florian

Just a heads-up for all beloved OPO users, there is a working H9 port being prepared, and we try to get this into a state where you all can test it.

This is a pre-requisite to try to carry this device over to 20.04 base. I feel excited, and we will keep you updated!

I can understand your frustration, but the problem is also not only we have limited resources for hardware adaption but overall limited resources.

As Ubuntu 16.04 is end of life now, we have to rush to support 20.04 LTS and that takes up all the resources. Minor steps are done still for Pinephone, but you wont notice so much. Like we fixed the speakerphone obviously these days.

And yes, we hoped to finally attract more developers to help us expanding and pushing forward but it simply did not happen. Linux devs got frustrated with UT concepts, especially confinement and isolation of apps, readonly filesystems etc. What works well for the end users does not work well with devs it seems.

We hope to bring a few more improvements for Pinephone later this year. But for the moment all our 3 or 4 fulltime devs are fully employed with upgrading the whole distribution, involving up to 400 repositories and deb packages to be rebuilt and fixed. It takes months, unfortunately.

Fellow Community,

TLDR;
we are doing some changes to our policy regarding the release candidate (RC) channel´s policy: while previously a new RC image was published every Wednesday morning CET we will publish a new RC only on demand from now on.

What are the reasons for that?

• We had cases where a critical bug was introduced in devel shortly before the automated RC release, but while discussion was started if RC needs to be blocked the cronjob published RC and made the issue even worse
• We want to give RC a real meaning: Users should be more aware about when its time for bug hunting, but in the time between releases they can rely on stable stability.
• Our CI, and the devices, are doing unnecessary compute, resulting in wasted CPU cycles, bytes transferred that bite off data quotas, and in general wear and tear of your eMMC. And sometimes just because someone translated a string in Weblate. So lets save some CO2!

FAQ

• Can I install an RC update manually still? - No, the image is not placed in the channel at all, there is no way to get it from the server.
• How will we be informed about a potential RC incoming? - We will roll social media drums, and also the device will show a pop-up notification telling you that you can install
• But I want to help testing things early! - Please switch to devel channel to do so, and back to RC when you are satisfied with the result.
• And what about Edge channel? - Please do not use the edge channel unless you know what you are doing, are fine with breaking your device for greater goals, or such things. We are not giving any support for issues that are caused by yourself moving off to uncharted territory. Also only a minority of devices even has this channel.

I hope that this change will suit you all well. Leave a message with any concerns.

BR Florian

@adorsaz There are a few complications when changing the push protocol. For the moment we already working on a unified push => ubuntu push bridge, and so you might want to join this Telegram group: https://t.me/+7zQzeeDVa38yZTIx We can discuss the things there in better detail

BR Florian

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

@julian@community.nodebb.org ah ok but what does subscribe to category then actually mean? I mean its possible, it shows subscribers in the category settings etc.

@julian@community.nodebb.org Ok so far so good. But the category still has no posts on "the other side" - any idea how this will happen - only with the next new post?

@julian@community.nodebb.org Ok that seems to work. Writing now from the forum

Wow thats fantastic news! I am really grateful that I could help TELEports to become a strong App in this ecosystem...

Nevertheless it is an effort that needs continuous contribution. And I cannot do so much (at the moment) for TELEports. I would be glad if one or two more people could help co-maintaining it, especillay for the larger Telegram/tdlib upgrade stories that are always a struggle.

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

HI, I am with UT since 2015/16 and we have discussed this topic a lot. The main blockers are:

• aGPS solely relying on cell tower coordinates is feasable for a certain range of devices, but not all of them. Its a feature deeply buried in the firmware of the phone and exposed via Android blobs where we have not much influence if it really works or not
• aGPS via WLAN AP names which is used by Android a lot is a simple matter of cost: There are no free databases and so we would need to charge for that in some way (or, maybe we could allow inserting your own token somehow, and you pay for yourself). But technically challenging.

We often take stuff on Android and iOS to be free for granted, but keep in mind that their cloud services require a lot of money to be operated on dedicated hardware and utilizing databases of other 3rd parties, and this is simply too much of a burden for a small OS project.

The same BTW goes for maps and navigation, though we got this currently nicely covered.

Update: I need to allow any forum to be subscribeable from Mastodon. Now I can do this:

That should alert me about new posts in News forum on Mastodon. Maybe however it will not report all replies made lets see

@Voorstad thats up to you but honestly I did not even know these 2 icons are there. Its a default setting from NodeBB and so far nobody had any request about them. We will look into it.