Best posts made by Flohack

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.

I am just saying that there will be no naming discussion in the near future. There are no plans to change the name, as our marketing guys decided.

BR Florian

@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

Now reading that Gitlab uses Google cloud for all their services and I asking myself if Google is less evil than MS (probably not). So I am still not sure where all that MS hate comes from. My first PC was an IBM XT in the year 1989 and of course it used MS-DOS (first PC-DOS by IBM, but IBM did not get it right over the years ;)) - I used MS products since then, some were good, some were real crap, of course. But in the end, everyone has the right to fail.

So I really want you to think about this like: Modern computing would not be on the same level as it is now without global players who were trying to make a business with it. MS drove a lot of standard committees (of course with their interests but also for our all benefit) and invested money into technology. Whet-ever you like or use their products is one thing, but hating is really inappropriate. In the last consequence it would mean to hate everyone on the planet who had a clever sales idea. Thats too anarchic for me.

BR

@stefano No worries, we cannot just focus on the Librem, we want to be as broad as possible, as our users might not be happy if just locked into one hardware.

There are many porters doing Halium ports right now, see https://github.com/Halium/projectmanagement/issues and WOW there are many good starting points for new devices already. Hopefully some of them will be great UT devices one day!

W.I.P. - Work in progress, I could not try this, as my WiFi driver does not support P2P mode

Motivation
Many of us do not have either a N5, a slimport adapter or a wifi dongle for Miracast, but want to try out convergence to see if they like it. Fun fact, there is an open-source development called Miraclecast which also provides a sink, i.e. an endpoint for the phone to cast the screen to.

Preconditions
Your wireless NIC should support the following modes in order to do P2P communication:

• P2P-client (Client)
• P2P-GO (Group owner)
• P2P-device

This can be found out by using the iw phy command. Check for supported interface modes in the output when you run the iw phy command. Most of the modern WirelessNICs support this feature. Do not mix it up with the supported frames, the list follows after

    Supported interface modes:

How - Linux

1. Add the following ppa to your desktop Ubuntu installation: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/miraclecast
2. Update your package list: sudo apt-get update
3. Install miraclecast: sudo apt install miraclecast
4. Stop NetworkManager and wpa supplicant: systemctl stop NetworkManager.service && systemctl stop wpa_supplicant.service
5. Start the miraclecast daemon: sudo miracle-wifid &
6. Start the controlling application: sudo miracle-sinkctl
7. It should report that it has added a link. Start this link by running it with the number of the output in place: run my_number_here
8. If all goes well you can discover the device from the system settings on your phone, under Brightness & Screen. Enable external displays and then look into wireless displays.

How - Windows
Luckily the steps involved with Windows as OS are much less. Basically you can try this with either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. For Windows 8.1 please try to install the demo version of this software: AirServer Universal. For Windows 10 there is a integrated solution available:

1. Tap on the Windows-key, type connect, and hit the Enter-key.

You either get "The device doesn't support Miracast, so you can't project to it wirelessly", or " 'name' is ready for you to connect wirelessly".

@lduboeuf we want to ride the wave of the trademark. Ubuntu is known to so many people, you dont need to explain the product in the beginnen, everybody recognizes immediately what that is

To be clear of what was the among problems of Github:

• Having operational costs higher than income (loss in the range of 60 mil $$ in 2016)
• Having no CEO, and no one obviously wanting to have this job
• Probably not getting more money from the banks

So, in this situation, you got 3 choices: Cease to exist, or get a partner, or sell. Github is free for public code, but obviously not enough people wanted to pay for it. File bankruptcy is not an option, it would hurt the planet a lot, and you will be forever in the books as "the guys who destroyed FOSS", ignoring the fact that FOSS is not Github.

Getting a partner as second option needs a strong leadership which was obviously not there. Unable to find a CEO for such an attractive company seems very odd to me. Whats wrong in their owners and board level, if they are looking for almost one year? So probably also partnering up was out of question.

So sell it. Especially for that price. Of course money can buy anything on this planet, if it is just enough of it.

The time of all-free services on the internet is over, and we should rather ask, what is it worth to have an independent provider of services? And what everyone would pay for it?

@WLBI Yes basically you are right but: Just bringing in Android apps makes us not much better than current Android. In fact, those apps will be a little slower, and some of them might not work, because we might not be able to bring in all APIs. You also are then again bound to the race of updating everything in the same tempo as Google.

This is the hardest part, but I personally do not think that Android compatibility should be a priority. Its nice to have Anbox, but it will not save us form developing a good unique selling proposition.

From the telegram group, M K wrote:

Actually that would be the last nail in the coffin for Ubuntu. Never, ever develop compatibility if you are the underdog.

I agree on that. The killer feature is Convergence and having all Linux desktop Apps also running on the phone with only minor adaptions necessary. Everything else is old news for consumers.

Motivation
The Fairphone 2 has got some interesting firmware updates that most users seem to have missed on Ubuntu Touch. While Android users can utilize the updater App made by Fairphone, Ubuntu Touch users are mostly stuck with the stock firmware that came with their device, which might be outdated. Support suggests to update firmware for battery stability and reboot issues. So I thought I give it a try.

Note: My results are probably skewed since I also use 16.04 on this device, but I will flash another one with 15.04 to verify them

My reboots have dropped, and the battery life has been extended. So I am seeking users that can confirm or disprove this.

How

1. Download the latest Android update package for Fairphone 2 to your PC: https://storage.googleapis.com/fairphone-updates/3c9e6339-28cc-498c-9fe5-89c8a9c3c9db/FP2-gms-18.03.1-ota-from-18.02.0.zip
2. The zip file contains a "firmware" folder. We only need this, extract it to a location of your choice
3. Connect your phone, developer mode must be enabled
4. issue the following command: adb reboot bootloader - The phone will enter fastboot mode
5. Open a shell at the location where you have extracted the firmware folder
6. Issue the following commands exactly as stated:
   6.1. sudo fastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.bin
   6.2. sudo fastboot flash sbl1 sbl1.mbn
   6.3. sudo fastboot flash rpm rpm.mbn
   6.4. sudo fastboot flash tz tz.mbn
   6.5. sudo fastboot flash dbi sdi.mbn
   6.6. sudo fastboot flash aboot emmc_appsboot.mbn
   6.7. sudo fastboot reboot
7. The phone will reboot normally

That´s it - please report your success or not

BR Florian

@Glatorius The new camera app has resolution selection built in

Hi Guys,

some update, we will install a translation platform (Weblate probably) to make it much easier for you. You dont need to fork anything on Github, just do the real work on the translation.

Depending on progress I think I can get it up&running until end of week. I keep you updated...

BR

@CyberAly I am a bit opposed against emphasizing Ubuntu in the name. TBH Canonical let us all down, and now we should give them free advertisment for their name? Nah I dont like this. We are not affiliated with them, and on th elong run I want some distance here....

BR

Thread for collecting ideas about a potential document scanning App that is really missing from UT. Initially should take BW picture, auto-crop the page if possible, correct trapezoid and then save as PDF

Good Morning,

as we do not have access to mainlined open-sourced drivers each device starts an Android container that makes the userspace blobs working and connects them with the running UBuntu ecosystem.

As Android uses Linux kernel which is GPLed, all drivers are open-sourced in the kernel. But most of those drivers are only shims, and the real magic happens in the non-free part of a userspace service interacting with the driver.

So yes, each device that we port from Android to UT has a sinificant amount of non-free firmware and userspace services running. If you remove them, you will loose phone/network and camera functions, and probably also GPU. So pretty much a useless device in the end.

And I dont think that we are riding the FOSS argument to give people false impressions about having a completly open-sourced phone. Everyone who reads our docs closely can immediately see that we are providing Ubuntu on top of a low-level Android and that this means a lot of compromises. Still, its currently the only way to go if you want to keep at least basic functions working (devices still struggle with sensors, compass, bluetooth etc. despite the use of Android blobs)

If you think our documents are misleading please point out the respective text parts so that we can make it more clear. Thanks!

BR

@izd While I agree with you, convergence is to me not so much there is another aspect:

If we are able to run usual desktop apps also on the phone, we open the door for existing apps just to be modified to have a mobile experience. We cannot catch up with Android or Apple regarding the ecosystem of their proprietary apps. We can, on the other side, throw in the Linux goodness of having already tons of desktop apps.

So to make it easier also for the tablets, I think we should aim for convergence, too. It will not cost that much power, and it will bring us many cool applications & solutions. So you should be PRO convergence, even if you will never use it

Hello Guys,

after some long time small update for this thread: As it seems, Bluez and all its problems in 15.04 might persist on 16.04, since it seems it has been backported from xenial to vivid. So we are in very small hope that things will improve. Sorry to not give a better answer at the moment. But we can finally only tell if its like this when 16.04 is out.

In the meanwhile I hacked around a small problem that might affect you also: https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1030/howto-change-the-name-of-your-device-for-bluetooth-pairing - Just to let you know we did not forget about Bluetooth

BR Florian

Motivation
If you are using Bluetooth you might have noticed that there is something odd about the device name. It is set statically to "XY Ubuntu Edition" or "FP2" or whatever. On the Oneplus, its currently even wrong, indicating "FP2".

So if you for example share a family car, and there are more UT users. how can they distinguish their phones in the carkit? And so on...

We are aware of this problem and will try to fix it in upcoming releases. Meanwhile you can apply the following fix. So, lets once more hack the system...

How
This time its really simple. You need to type those commands on your PC in a shell window, not on the phone itself:

1. Open an adb shell into your phone: adb shell
2. Gain root privileges by typing sudo -i and entering your unlock PIN or password
3. Remount the root file system writable: mount -o remount,rw /
4. edit the config file that is responsible: nano /etc/machine-info
5. Change the PRETTY_HOSTNAME field to whatever you like. I recommend though to not use special characters. Spaces are OK!
6. Reboot the phone

Note: After rebooting the phone is set to readonly again, so in case you want to change the name later you need to follow the whole procedure again.

This should be all that is necessary to give you a rocking unique Bluetooth name!

Motivation
Currently MTP access is broken on the OPO and users cannot access their files easily. While a fix has been pushed for 16.04 (OTA-4) already, current vivid needs to be fixed manually.

How
Warning: This fix needs to be applied carefully, it can damage your system files! You need to type those commands on your PC in a shell window, not on the phone itself:

1. Reboot your phone into recovery: adb reboot recovery
2. Open an adb shell into your phone: adb shell
3. Create a temporary directory /a, and loop-mount the system image into it: mkdir /a && mount /data/system.img /a
4. Create a temporary directory /b, and loop-mount the android image into it: mkdir /b && mount /a/var/lib/lxc/android/system.img /b
5. exit adb shell by pressing CTRL-D
6. Transfer the rules file to your PC: adb pull /b/ubuntu/usr/lib/lxc-android-config/70-bacon.rules
7. edit the file with your favourite text editor and change the following: from ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="mtp_usb", OWNER="root", GROUP="mtp", MODE="0660" to ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="mtp_usb", OWNER="root", GROUP="plugdev", MODE="0660" (Note the changed group)
8. Push back the changed file: adb push 70-bacon.rules /b/ubuntu/usr/lib/lxc-android-config
9. To be safe, re-enter the adb shell: adb shell
10. Force changes to disk: sync && umount /b && umount -l /a && sync
11. exit adb shell by pressing CTRL-D
12. reboot device and hope its working: adb reboot

Hope that works for you!

BR Florian

Motivation
Baseband firmware has a lot to do with battery life. Since the battery life on the N5 is not the latest and greatest on the planet, small improvements could have an overall bonus effect.

How

1. Grab the latest factory image for the N5 from Google´s developer page: https://developers.google.com/android/images#hammerhead - currently that´s 6.0.1 (M4B30Z, Dec 2016)

2. Open the archive and extract only the radio firmware, probably named like this:

3. Connect the device to USB and bring it into fastboot mode by either using adb and adb reboot bootloader from console, or by pressing and holding Vol-Down button and then powering up the device. Verify you are connected with the device:
   

4. Flash the radio firmware by using this statement:
   

5. Reboot your device and test if it was successful: Radio and internet should work, have 3G/4G etc. Observe battery drain over the next days. Also maybe this helps WiFi hotspot, who knows

BR Florian