I hate to say it - but I have to disagree with @dobey here - my primary reason for using Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver phone is how the fabulously intuitive native Terminal made using emacs and org-mode on UT an absolute breeze! I have an almost identical replica of emacs on UT to the one on my laptop (running Arch Linux) - and incrementally sync all of my .org files back and forth between UT and my laptop using unison (and a home server).

Install emacs on UT using apt - and then edit your .emacs file in home/phablet/ as you would usually do

As for emacs navigation, as @dobey says, you simply edit and customise one of Terminal's .json files to your liking - and then all of your classic emacs commands are on the command bar below the terminal screen. I've modified mine quite logically so that the most used emacs shortcuts appear first - in my case, CTRL+C, CTRL+X, CTRL+A etc.

To get around the missing ALT key, simply change keymappings in your .emacs file - for example, I use wanderlust in emacs for reading and writing mail and the original command to open wanderlust in emacs is "M-x wl" - so on UT, in my .emacs file, I have added:

(define-key global-map "\C-xw" 'wl)

and now "CTRL-X w" opens wanderlust

Many native emacs packages also use CTRL commands as alternatives for ALT - Dired for example (emacs built-in file browser and manager) also uses "CTRL-X d"

I have even installed texlive-full and auctex (in a chroot) on UT and used it to draft manuscripts and export to PDF - all in emacs on my phone.

So @cpb, a fully-functioning and buttery-smooth emacs experience on UT is the reason I feel like I'm carrying a fully-fledged workstation in my pocket!

Hey guys

I'm Bry Wilson, a marine biologist and bioinformatician, started as a SUSE user in 2005, moved on to Ubuntu Warty Warthog soon after (ah, the joy of compiling my own ndiswrapper for wifi-access), stuck with Ubuntu until 2014 and then migrated to Arch. For s**ts and giggles, I made the jump to FreeBSD two months ago

I bought a second hand Nexus4 in late February 2013 just to install the first hilariously unuseable Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview install. I've been using Ubuntu Touch as my only and everyday phone for two years nows (my worthwhile friends installing Telegram on their Android and iOS phones just to stay in touch with me...). I picked up a secondhand Meizu Pro5 in January in anticipation of the move to 64-bit snaps - and then of course Canonical pulled the plug

For me, the absolute number-one defining advantage of UT (not counting the relative security of being free of the locked-down Android and iOS ecosystems) is the native terminal - and the power of customisation that gives me. I've briefly flirted with Android and installing a terminal on there but it is a pale almost powerless shadow of the UT's native one.

I've been using the Meizu Pro5 in full convergence mode (with a Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter v2, Dell 24" monitor, Logitech K810 bluetooth keyboard and Logitech M555b bluetooth mouse) as my everyday production machine since February. Essentially all of my work involves running analyses on high-performance computers over ssh and so I'm just leaping between tabbed terminals on UT, my Rockwork linked Pebble Steel notifying when my jobs have completed. I'd also call myself an emacs "power user" (essentially living within the emacs environment) and have a full setup installed in my UT root directory, with my org-mode terminal constantly running on my phone. I write my publications in LaTeX and so have also installed a xenial chroot with emacs again, a full TeXLive installation and R statistics software.

There's still a number of crucial bugs in UT convergence and I've spent a lot of time in recent months scripting workarounds for those - I'm a fairly passionate believer in UT and will try to support UBports in any way I can - I think it's a fabulous community!

For the record as well, I'm installing the UBports updates over adb in recovery mode (pushing over the files to the sdcard and untar-ing them on the phone) and keeping all of my data intact with each upgrade. A simple bash script then reinstalls all of my emacs packages back into the root directory afterwards.

I'm very much hoping that UBports might still give us 64-bit M10 and Pro5 owners the Xenial snap update!

Cheers and thanks for all the hard work guys

Bry

Well, I've had a wee play around - thanks @zubozrout for the Google Play tips. Whilst I love the idea of Anbox - having your Ubuntu Touch cake and eating it - my major use for it (as a 16.04/devel daily user!) was to install Android apps until UT ones became fully functional again. Primarily, this was to try and install Android browsers (using FDroid) until the UT stock browser or browser next were upgraded such that I could access some of my more frequently browsed websites. However, I couldn't get any of the Android browsers to work - they installed but then hung whilst trying to access a URL.

However, I did install DAVDroid (a CalDav sync tool) and successfully sync'd (or is it sunk?) my nextCloud calendar to the Anbox Calendar! I then I hilariously noticed that a recent upgrade (was it today's?) actually fixed the UT stock calendar - so, I of course immediately deleted the now unnecessary DAVDroid app Point in case!

I also installed the nextCloud Notes app from FDroid - and it worked perfectly with my nextCloud server!

Which got me thinking as to whether we might have a page somewhere on the UBports website, dedicated to those Anbox apps which successfully install or not. I'm thinking it might be a little like the WINE-software compatibility pages, where apps get bronze, silver and gold ratings depending upon the app's useability. Just a thought.

I was also thinking - slightly snobbishly - that the presence of those Android icons in my Apps Scope made me feel a little unclean. I know UT is lagging slightly(!) behind iOS and Android for apps - and Anbox fills an apparently necessary gap - but that doesn't mean I want them right there on my UT Apps Scope Any chance - and this may already be in the pipeline - we might be able to have a dedicated Anbox Scope?

Finally - and for completeness' sake (and not that I'm considering it now) - but how do I go about totally removing Anbox from UT?

Hey Milan @mk73,

I would absolutely love to share my experiences with the UBports users and give something back! Although will honestly admit that I consider myself more a "curator of assembled knowledge" (akin to standing on the shoulders of giants!) than an original fount of that knowledge. The internet and all its wonderful contributors have been my inspiration - but I do also realise the importance and use of actually having all of these titbits and tweaks in a single place.

So, yep, consider me sold on writing an "emacs on UT" blog. It'll probably be quite useful for me to write some of this stuff down too

Long ago I was utterly overwhelmed by the idea of convergence and that I could carry a fully-fledged desktop in my pocket - several years down the line and we've inched (to be fair to Canonical and UBports, leapt!) closer but it's still not ideal. I originally tried this with the first Nexus4 over Slimport but of course the Nexus was a little too slow to be considered a "desktop replacement"...and then came the beast that is the Meizu Pro 5! With aethercast!

So, I picked myself up a Microsoft Wireless Display adapter and wham, there you have it.

Well, almost.

Two issues that still seem to be plagueing my dream of convergence and I just wanted to throw them out there to see if there were any forthcoming answers...

First off, aethercast - the version that ships with 16.04/devel still suffers from the problem of a fuzzy resolution, if I remember rightly, this was to do with aethercast having a maximum resolution below 1920x1080 and therefore upsampling the lower resolution to fit a full HD screen. There was a patch that worked beautifully on modifying the aethercast to allow this and give a crystal clear Full HD display over aethercast - but it seems that the patched version (admittedly generated from the Vivid aethercast) no longer works on Xenial. Does anyone have the patched Xenial aethercast?

Secondly, bluetooth-wifi coexistence - as soon as the wireless display is engaged, my otherwise speedy bluetooth mouse and keyboard grind to a stuttering halt. I've tried modifying iwlwifi.conf to a disable coexistence (which seems to work on laptops) but to no avail.

I've slowly but surely been finding workarounds and scripts for other issues - but these two have evaded me so far

Any tips?

Nice work indeed @mariogrip - wonderful to see Anbox development continues!

I just tested on a Meizu Pro 5 (running 16.04/devel, Version 162) and when the phone is fastboot rebooted after the anbox-kernel flash, neither of the SIMs is detected.

I simply fastboot flashed the previous boot.img back - and my dual SIMs are detected once more, no apparent harm done

So, it seems that Anbox is not quite ready for those users requiring a Meizu Pro 5 that still also makes and receives phone calls...

Hey @tartanspartan, I totally agree with you regarding freeing up the wireless traffic for the aethercast video stream - it seems the logical solution - but as far as I'm aware (and I could of course be utterly mistaken), there are no USB OTG mice or keyboards that can be used with the Meizu Pro 5's single USB-C connection

However, if you (or anybody!) know of any, then please please let me know!

Re: adb shell not working Meizu Pro 5

Hey guys, as the topic title suggests, I'm on a Meizu Pro 5 running the UBports 15.04 Devel channel r37 - and for some time now, I haven't been able to connect to my phone with my Arch Linux laptop using adb. I plug the phone in - it charges - but when I run "adb devices", no devices are listed. "lsusb" sees the phone too.

I've:

a) killed and restarted the adb server and tried connecting again
b) checked that my adb key in ~/.android on the laptop is there
c) plugged in an android phone to the laptop - which is successfully listed by "adb devices"
d) tried the Meizu Pro 5 on other Linux and FreeBSD machines with adb
e) Checked and unchecked Developer Mode and changed logon security from fingerprint to code

No joy with any of the above! I'm quite happy to copy smaller files over by scp - but 2GB HD movies are a chore without a cable and ADB

Interestingly, when I plugged the phone into a new Linux machine, there was no popup on the phone about accepting the new connection...

I've started a new topic, as my issue is not quite the same as the one "adb shell not working Meizu Pro 5" - I'm not even detecting a device!

Cheers

Bry

I'm replying to myself here to stay within the confines of this topic - but I've been beating my head against the wall on this one...

Basically, my ongoing issue with convergence on the Meizu Pro 5 (on 16.04/devel) is the "fuzzy" resolution using aethercast - and I know that it's purely down to the resolution being set in aethercast/src/ac/basesourcemediamanager.cpp to 720p and not 1080p.

I scavenged an old laptop today, installed Ubuntu on it (I'm an Arch Linux user by default) and was trying to cross-compile a UBports xenial version of aethercast to upgrade the output resolution to 1080, as per this patch:

https://launchpadlibrarian.net/267505693/p1.diff

However, try as I might, I can't past these errors during cross-compiling:

Get:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports xenial InRelease [247 kB]
Err:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports xenial InRelease
The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 40976EAF437D05B5 NO_PUBKEY 3B4FE6ACC0B21F32

I've tried importing those keys - goodness me, I have - but to no avail.

So, in a big shout out to @mardy (who is maintaining ubports/aethercast), is there any chance that you might be able to add these three lines to the code and recompile in the near future? The patch worked wonderfully on 15.04 and I briefly (before moving to 16.04/devel) had a crystal clear 1920x1080 UT desktop on my external monitor.

Or is there an excellent reason that the 1080 isn't included by default? It seems a little odd, as almost all external monitors are at least 1920x1080 now - as I mentioned before, I had to trawl through our department's old IT storeroom to find a ten-year old monitor with a native 720p resolution - which is seemingly the only way to have crystal clear resolution using aethercast in 16.04/devel!

I really appreciate that @mardy does so much for the community already - and I know that there's likely so many more important issues to deal with - but it seems a simple change to the code and would make for a wonderful early Christmas present.

Or a late Thanksgiving one for any North Americans on the site

Hey Milan @mk73,

I would absolutely love to share my experiences with the UBports users and give something back! Although will honestly admit that I consider myself more a "curator of assembled knowledge" (akin to standing on the shoulders of giants!) than an original fount of that knowledge. The internet and all its wonderful contributors have been my inspiration - but I do also realise the importance and use of actually having all of these titbits and tweaks in a single place.

So, yep, consider me sold on writing an "emacs on UT" blog. It'll probably be quite useful for me to write some of this stuff down too

Hey @doniks, sorry for the late reply - I love the touch navigation in the UT Terminal and it's consistently the major reason I'm using UT - I think I can safely say that I have tried every - and I mean every - android terminal emulator out there and nothing has come close to the UT Terminal experience. Well, I say nothing - the Termux developers are doing a great job bringing the Linux experience to Android phones but you're still very much restricted to the Termux environment and limited software selection.

The page navigation by touch does need some tweaking - but in the Terminal Scroll menu, I've found that the PG_UP, PG_DN, HOME and END suffice in lieu of that...

I find it difficult to suggest improvements without sounding like I'm complaining - because in my opinion, there is no mobile device terminal that comes close to this...and certainly with a keyboard attached, the UT Terminal experience is much improved - especially since the new terminal (which I have in 16.04 "devel") included tabbed terminals and keybindings for flipping between them.

I've spent my time tweaking instead the emacs config file (.emacs in the /home/phablet/ directory) to sidestep some of the issues moving from computer to UT - and I shall at some point when I have a moment, share those with everybody here.

I'm slightly bashful at being called a "mobile terminal warrior" - but have spent a comedic number of hours optimising UT for that full desktop experience. Last January, I actually presented a plenary lecture on my research in front of a couple of hundred scientists - and prepared the whole hour-long presentation on UT, using Gimp in Libertine for slide preparation and Beamer in LaTeX (in emacs in a chroot).

It is possible to carry a workstation in your pocket

I hate to say it - but I have to disagree with @dobey here - my primary reason for using Ubuntu Touch as my daily driver phone is how the fabulously intuitive native Terminal made using emacs and org-mode on UT an absolute breeze! I have an almost identical replica of emacs on UT to the one on my laptop (running Arch Linux) - and incrementally sync all of my .org files back and forth between UT and my laptop using unison (and a home server).

Install emacs on UT using apt - and then edit your .emacs file in home/phablet/ as you would usually do

As for emacs navigation, as @dobey says, you simply edit and customise one of Terminal's .json files to your liking - and then all of your classic emacs commands are on the command bar below the terminal screen. I've modified mine quite logically so that the most used emacs shortcuts appear first - in my case, CTRL+C, CTRL+X, CTRL+A etc.

To get around the missing ALT key, simply change keymappings in your .emacs file - for example, I use wanderlust in emacs for reading and writing mail and the original command to open wanderlust in emacs is "M-x wl" - so on UT, in my .emacs file, I have added:

(define-key global-map "\C-xw" 'wl)

and now "CTRL-X w" opens wanderlust

Many native emacs packages also use CTRL commands as alternatives for ALT - Dired for example (emacs built-in file browser and manager) also uses "CTRL-X d"

I have even installed texlive-full and auctex (in a chroot) on UT and used it to draft manuscripts and export to PDF - all in emacs on my phone.

So @cpb, a fully-functioning and buttery-smooth emacs experience on UT is the reason I feel like I'm carrying a fully-fledged workstation in my pocket!

In my current mission to use our Ubuntu Touch phones as fully-convergent computers, I installed pdftotext in the terminal and use this handy little one-liner to search all PDFs in a folder:

find $PATH -name '*.pdf' -exec sh -c 'pdftotext "{}" - | grep --with-filename --label="{}" --color "TEXT TO SEARCH FOR"' ;

Where $PATH is the full path you want to search and "TEXT TO SEARCH FOR" is um, the text you want to search for.

In a slightly more elegant way - and as I have - you can use emacs (in my mind, the only way to fully unleash the power of a convergent machine in your pocket!) on UT, install recoll and helm-recoll and then have instant searching through PDFs for text

Hey @tartanspartan, I totally agree with you regarding freeing up the wireless traffic for the aethercast video stream - it seems the logical solution - but as far as I'm aware (and I could of course be utterly mistaken), there are no USB OTG mice or keyboards that can be used with the Meizu Pro 5's single USB-C connection

However, if you (or anybody!) know of any, then please please let me know!

Hey @doniks

I've rooted around and actually found the link for that aethercast patch! It was from an old Ubuntu Touch Google+ post from two years back:

https://plus.google.com/+ReinerKlenk/posts/hRn4nqxVf99

And I remembered correctly - the aethercast was originally only meant to work up to 720p, but the very simple patch allowed 1080p. My own comedy workaround prior to this was to use an old computer monitor whose maximum resolution was 1280 x 720 - and then the aethercast image was crystal clear

With regards to the other things, it was little scripts in Terminal to deal with the bugs in convergence, including:

1. Losing wi-fi internet access, when wirelessly casting - this simply involved using nmcli to restart the Access Point without turning off the wifi radio

2. Flipping between Staged and Windowed modes using a script instead of UT Tweak - I rarely use a mouse if I can help it (even on my laptop), relying instead on keybindings. I still find using the phonescreen as a touchpad (whilst very innovative!) a little clunky. The biggest improvement for me using the Pro5 for convergence was 16.04/devel's new Terminal with tabbed and multiple windows accessed by keymappings.

3. I did try and play around with aethercastctl in some scripts to automate things (in particular, quickly connecting and disconnecting my phone from the screen when I had to take it with me suddenly), but it didn't work so well

In my ideal convergence world, I'd be able to access every part of the converged OS from the keyboard and without using the touchpad or a mouse. More than anything, I'd love to be able to navigate the Apps with arrow keys and tabs for selection, which (unless I'm missing something) isn't possible yet...

Oh and the browser too! On my laptop, I primarily use suckless' surf with keyboard links - I press Shift+Ctrl+F and every link on a webpage is highlighted with a little superscript number, allowing almost complete keyboard navigation of the browser....ah, one day Browser Next

Long ago I was utterly overwhelmed by the idea of convergence and that I could carry a fully-fledged desktop in my pocket - several years down the line and we've inched (to be fair to Canonical and UBports, leapt!) closer but it's still not ideal. I originally tried this with the first Nexus4 over Slimport but of course the Nexus was a little too slow to be considered a "desktop replacement"...and then came the beast that is the Meizu Pro 5! With aethercast!

So, I picked myself up a Microsoft Wireless Display adapter and wham, there you have it.

Well, almost.

Two issues that still seem to be plagueing my dream of convergence and I just wanted to throw them out there to see if there were any forthcoming answers...

First off, aethercast - the version that ships with 16.04/devel still suffers from the problem of a fuzzy resolution, if I remember rightly, this was to do with aethercast having a maximum resolution below 1920x1080 and therefore upsampling the lower resolution to fit a full HD screen. There was a patch that worked beautifully on modifying the aethercast to allow this and give a crystal clear Full HD display over aethercast - but it seems that the patched version (admittedly generated from the Vivid aethercast) no longer works on Xenial. Does anyone have the patched Xenial aethercast?

Secondly, bluetooth-wifi coexistence - as soon as the wireless display is engaged, my otherwise speedy bluetooth mouse and keyboard grind to a stuttering halt. I've tried modifying iwlwifi.conf to a disable coexistence (which seems to work on laptops) but to no avail.

I've slowly but surely been finding workarounds and scripts for other issues - but these two have evaded me so far

Any tips?

Hey @mihael, that's interesting - I'm on a Meizu Pro 5 (16.04/devel) with Anbox installed - and my battery profile is seemingly utterly unaffected. I fully charged three hours ago - and I'm at 98% now.

Although, I did disable anbox (with "anbox-tool disable")...

Well, I've had a wee play around - thanks @zubozrout for the Google Play tips. Whilst I love the idea of Anbox - having your Ubuntu Touch cake and eating it - my major use for it (as a 16.04/devel daily user!) was to install Android apps until UT ones became fully functional again. Primarily, this was to try and install Android browsers (using FDroid) until the UT stock browser or browser next were upgraded such that I could access some of my more frequently browsed websites. However, I couldn't get any of the Android browsers to work - they installed but then hung whilst trying to access a URL.

However, I did install DAVDroid (a CalDav sync tool) and successfully sync'd (or is it sunk?) my nextCloud calendar to the Anbox Calendar! I then I hilariously noticed that a recent upgrade (was it today's?) actually fixed the UT stock calendar - so, I of course immediately deleted the now unnecessary DAVDroid app Point in case!

I also installed the nextCloud Notes app from FDroid - and it worked perfectly with my nextCloud server!

Which got me thinking as to whether we might have a page somewhere on the UBports website, dedicated to those Anbox apps which successfully install or not. I'm thinking it might be a little like the WINE-software compatibility pages, where apps get bronze, silver and gold ratings depending upon the app's useability. Just a thought.

I was also thinking - slightly snobbishly - that the presence of those Android icons in my Apps Scope made me feel a little unclean. I know UT is lagging slightly(!) behind iOS and Android for apps - and Anbox fills an apparently necessary gap - but that doesn't mean I want them right there on my UT Apps Scope Any chance - and this may already be in the pipeline - we might be able to have a dedicated Anbox Scope?

Finally - and for completeness' sake (and not that I'm considering it now) - but how do I go about totally removing Anbox from UT?