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.
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:
Missing:
Warning
This port is not yet ready for public testing. Therefore no images are provided at the time being. Depending on progress this may change sooner or later.
Install:
t.b.d.
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.
@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 ^^
@PINE64 A transparent one would be cool - It´s a project where you should see whats inside, so also give transparency to the hardware hehe...
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
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
And here it is: The first episode! https://soundcloud.com/ubports/porting-a-true-journey-episode-1-where-do-we-begin - Enjoy!
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
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
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".
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
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)
Open the archive and extract only the radio firmware, probably named like this:
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:
Flash the radio firmware by using this statement:
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
@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!
Hello, for switching our Nexus 5 core device to Halium 7.1 I will need alpha testers. As this device was already well supported I do not expect that we have really heavy bugs, but we shall see.
Until I am back with detailed installation instructions please just bookmark this thread if you are interested, or reply below.
Working
Working with manual steps
Not working
Just one more thought about this metric, unless the OS is finished and starts all necessary services, the boot time says absolutely nothing.
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?