Built 1974. Gamer. Programmer. Nerd. Want to see my Commodore 64? Languages English / German
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 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
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
Working with additional steps
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
Not working
Not tested:
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.
fastboot flash boot halium-boot.imghalium-install-standalone.sh -p ut ubports-touch.rootfs-xenial-armhf.tar.gz system.imgadb rebootNow the device should boot into the new system.
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.
Just 2 cents from a Windows user:
The Windows desktop was made in resemblance to a real desk and the things you find there: Files, Folders and even a trashbin (technically not ON the desktop ofc). Its a matter of personal preference HOW you organize your desktop:
My current desktop at work has 32 items: A mixture of starter icons, documents and whatever. Windows got adopted also for the "chaotic" way how you can work with it. It tries to give you maximum freedom on that:
Does anybody understand what´s going on here? No. Does the owner of this desktop understand it? Yes, and he might be most productive with it.
During work, I almost never have to go to the desktop, however. I use it rarely. Also a matter of personal preference.
Can´t we just offer: Appdrawer AND background to organize stuff? You could pin starters and documents to the background (Problem: convergence and how to deal with the layout?)
A good DE gives all users a possible way to develop their own habits and preferences. Not try to force them into a single use pattern.
BR
Thanks @UniSuperBox you have grown into an important role for the users, the foundation guys, for all of us. You are keeping an eye on things that others tend to overlook (esp. in Infra ^^), you are the best host we can have for the Q&As, and you do all this from out of another timezone, which for me would be th hardest part.
Thanks @NeoTheThird for the big product increment in the installer this year. From a quickly assembled thingie with lots of complicated stuff this has grown into a usable product which all other communities do not have, not with the features and also not with the slickness.
Thanks @mariogrip for hacking into the weirdest C++ hell in Unity 8 and Mir, I think no one else would be brave enough to do this, and then in the same time have "just little chats" with @alan_g as they sound like you would talk about gardening or the weather. With you digging all those mud piles we have the biggest possible product increment for the UX and UI that a small team like us could have. Not to say you are driving also the !Android phones (Not-Android lol) stuff, down to Rpi...
Thanks @dobey for being kinda 24/7 community manager, even if you sound like a club bouncer sometimes 
Your input is most valuable for us, for the users and for all new devs. It is impossible to drive this project without a few insiders, and you are currently the most active of them. I hope we can give back some day for what you have invested in time, answering our dumbest questions and rectifiying our bogus ideas about architecture.
Thanks @DanChapman for bootstrapping TELEports in such a nice way that we could build the probably most complex native App for UT out there in a few man months - besides your own Dekko 2 of course! And although I know, you probably wont read this anymore, I wanna say thank you. You have departed the project this year, for reasons we dont know and we would have hoped for a long time that it is not forever. While this hope is fading we all would be grateful to hearing from you again in the future.
Thanks @Krille @TimSueberkrueb @hummlbach jonny and all the others from the German group! You are self-organizing hackathons, you try to invest time and motivation into whatever product needs love most at a time. While we know that Germany has a big UT userbase, it is not common expectation and you do an outstanding job.
And finally: Thanks to all users! We would be nothing without you. Patiently waiting until things are fixed, and some bugs take years to proceed. Constantly trying to motivate us to go over the limit, to keep UT alive and useful. Giving us a reason of existence for this project. I remember when we started with way below 100 people in the first Telegram group, and how it filled up to 200 only days after Canonical sunk the ship. And when we got so much excited to see that there are enough people there that wont let it sink too much 
2019 was a terrific year for UT. But I am really excited about what will come in 2020. Next year we will write history.
@3arn0wl You need to make small steps. If you shoot for a high end device but it has constant problems, nobody will buy it, you failed and have wasted a lot of money. Once we have a basic phone and people see that things are working, we can talk about a Pro model ^^
@guru No need anymore! I got high-level contact to BQ today ... Actually the highest possible level We will send them our ideas and questions. Lets hope smth happens then
BR
@PINE64 I am starting to get nervous, with so many devices being online, if even half of them would only go for Ubuntu Touch, we need to ramp up our infrastructure for push notifications soon ^^
Dear All,
We are aware of this issue and we will try to hot-fix it until July 15th. We have to create our own Google app keys, and we think its not hard to fix, but might need a few days for preparation. Also I cannot say if we need to deploy and OTA for that or not.
BR
Not even 300,--- its more like 350-400,- € here. So thats definitely too much to expense for us atm.
@mendevi_0 4a is very pricy, even as used device. Nothing below 250-300 € - thats far too much for a private porter. So either a device is donated in some form or lend out.
Convergence is not "running desktop apps on a phone". For us its mainly a task to create Apps that behave well on devices of various size and capabilities.
Firefox is in no way optimized to run in UT, and Libertine is kind of a bridging the gap, but still has a lot of chances to break. You will run into a lot of usability issues, also exchanging data between other apps outside Libertine may not work.
There is no store for the "last known location" - also location is an asynchronous thing, you have to request it, and then continue doing other stuff, and after some time (shorter or longer depending on GPS coverage) you will receive a callnack with the current location (if location is turned on, and your App is not blocked by the user).
So its more a thing of responding to the actual location.
That said, command line is not a good place to start an app with. You can create a simple QML App that requests location. Also remember you need to put location access into the app´s manifest so that the system knows your app is depending on location.
Yeah that was my thinking. From my first N6P, the only I killed during repair, I know that most workflows are ok with 4 cores as well.
We anyways do not have the CPU-intense games or other apps that would benefit from 8 cores working at the same time. Sadly also the CPU governor that allows proper schedulding of 4 little and 4 big cores was lost somewhere in the kernel tree and is not possible to be activated anymore (support was discontinued already when Google still pushed for that feature).
So current governor sees 8 equal cores, and just assigned them randomly. That means big cores are already being used when little ones would be enough.
@Capsia Please let me and @NeoTheThird squash this dat in a more useful representation. The current maturity is a gut feeling value and need to be replaced with a better value from the actual test results.
However, it will be still a bit hard to compare devices with each other, aas we have fully to rely on what porters think its working. There is no good QA process when we do not have a single QA team that can test all devices side by side.
Also, my I know, who talked with you from the foundation side to actually work on this page?
@rocket2nfinity Or we decide as a community to limit to 4 cores for all users
@rocket2nfinity Its highly unlikely it will ever get one: The pictures are embedded in the bootloader and probably signed. Just to prefent tampering, and basically its a good idea
@sagrotan humm that is strange. I ported this device, it took me over one year, I would have thought to have found all potential problems.
Can you see your hosts dmesg after the phone is stuck at the boot screen, if you receive any messages there about an RNDIS interface after you connect a USB cable?