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
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
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:
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
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thopiekar/miraclecastsudo apt-get updatesudo apt install miraclecastsystemctl stop NetworkManager.service && systemctl stop wpa_supplicant.servicesudo miracle-wifid &sudo miracle-sinkctlrun my_number_hereHow - 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:
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".
Posted in the German UBports group:
#PlasmaMobile on postmarketOS running on Pine64's Pinephone development kit.
@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:
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
adb reboot bootloader - The phone will enter fastboot modesudo fastboot flash modem NON-HLOS.binsudo fastboot flash sbl1 sbl1.mbnsudo fastboot flash rpm rpm.mbnsudo fastboot flash tz tz.mbnsudo fastboot flash dbi sdi.mbnsudo fastboot flash aboot emmc_appsboot.mbnsudo fastboot rebootThat´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