@DerekZoZo said:

it felt like an attack the way you phrased that

@keneda said actually 'Maybe you should try first'

As for me I'll call this a 'suggestion', certainly not an 'attack'.

I'll share some reservations about the english speaking Volla forums (did not try the german ones). I did get an answer, but it was not very informative, so finally I answered my own question (much later).

Another suggestion (feel free to characterize that as an attack if you want) could be to post a work item on the Gitlab repo for the device here

You'll be more likely to interact directly with the person(s) doing the actual porting job. There is actually a work item created already. In it the dev seems to say it's possible with 'shenanigans', maybe could give you some tips if you ask nicely.

@Sander said in Add "Tab" key to Ubuntu Touch keyboard?:

You can tap anywhere on the terminal area to mimick the behavior of the tab key

thanks for this hidden gem ! TIL

Here are the videos recorded about mobile:

https://video.fosdem.org/2026/ub4132/

UT is mentioned in the videos about state of Foss on mobile and the one about the apps store: the UT one is rather well placed, however Flatpak is coming for mobile and it has already a dominant position in general Linux apps.

The video about openHarmony is intriguing given the resources of the organisations behind it.

I have been interested by the one about push notifications, apparently more ready for prime time that I was thinking. It seems that the only real solution for Linux clients is the kde one, that would seem a good fit for UT since it uses QT.

@shano said in Why is Wayland compositor and Lomiri so far in terms of functionality compared to Compiz and Unity7 released some 20 years ago?:

Compiz was released in 2006 and is still maintained. Unity7 was released in 2010 and is still maintained. My question is why Wayland and Lomiri are so far away in terms of functionality, plugins etc. compared to tech made 20 years ago.

Are we building on top or reinventing the wheel?

From what I see, Lomiri is not reinventing Unity 8, it is Unity 8.
I downloaded the Lomiri source code and counted roughly 18000 commits between 2013 and 2017 (end of Ubuntu involvement) and 1400 commits between 2018 and 2025. The main reason is probably that Unity was a business project with serious resources behind it, while Lomiri (the new name for Unity 8 since 2020) is an open source project with a few part time volunteers. Also, it may be that there was so much work in Unity that there is not a lot of new development necessary, the bulk of new work being in other parts of the full (and huge) smart phone stack. I did not count but I think that a large part of these 1400 commits are just translations.

I don't know Compiz but I tracked the project in its last hideout on Gitlab and counted about 30 commits in last 5 years, 20 of them in 2020. It's maintained in the most limited sense, there is almost no development.

Duh ! I will close this stoopid post, I had not used seriously a smartphone since several years and did not realize anymore how sensitive to location Gps services are. I tried only in 2 places in my home and both where unsuitable. When I got out in the air, Gps started to work. So it is working, really. I did a stroll this morning and it updated its position. I have still to get my hands to another brand of smartphone on Android to compare with the Fairphone 5 under UT to see how well it is working.

As an update, a draft MR was recently posted on Gitlab using the BeaconDB api (directly,not via Geoclue)

@GooglyBear said in GPS don't seem to work on FP5 UT 24.04 stable:

a GitLab issue to follow progress for Fairphone 5

AGPS is not really linked to a specific port (even if it can work on some devices it seems, but it's mostly unintended). It's tracked here

@poVoq

hello, not the dev here - but the links are not broken for me. The app is supposed to be based on

https://github.com/luigi311/ConverseJS-ubports

the links are a bit strange though (why not a software forge ? if the author don't like Github, there are other such as codeberg...). It's not stated in the original repo that the author has given up. Personally I'd not use this software without more information.

@Kadafi

you don't. This is a known way to brick your phone.

@Averiz

Congrats ! this is a great idea !

I tested it on my FP5 (24.04-1.1 stable) and it installed and restored the system keyboard. Needed to restart the phone but that's not important. Tested it with the terminal and a few browsers.

Good points:

1. I find it more pleasing to the eye that the system one.
2. It worked as well with alternate browsers (uWolf, Min) who have special methods to handle the keyboard.
3. with the terminal it does not interfer with the special input methods (double clic on the screen, special area

Minor points:

1. opening Min (an alternate browser) and Morph both with a blank initial screen, entering 'https:' and clicking on the blank screen generated a mad flickering of the keyboard and a Js error in the browser code (I took a screenshot but for some reason it's unreadable).

2. when setting / unsetting it as system keyboard there is some delay after clicking the button with no apparent feedback.

3. I (and I think most people) expected it to respect the system preferences for the language, nope, it's necessary to setup the keyboard in its own config screen. Yes, it's actually a high expection This config screen is not totally obvious by the way. I managed after a few mistakes to select the French Azerty as the default and it displayed finally - in Qwerty . I clicked on the 'AZ' key and it was Azerty finally.

4. after restoring the system OSK I set it again as the default, and I got back the qwerty with the french Azerty left selected, and this time clicking on AZ did not change the disposition, it stayed Qwerty.

5. still with the French Azerty, the text 'Keyboard - French - French (AZER) spills over the key ',' at the left (see screenshot)

@mariogrip

FP5 build 144

I can half confirm @shafiqalibhai report about external storage, for me the external storage is seen and mounted (it can be used from the command line), however it is indeed not seen in Places.

For reference, here is how it appears on 24.04-1.3:

clicking on the 'name' (well, id) of the device allows to browse.

With 26.04, the display is identical but the entry marked with an arrow in my screenshot is missing.

While I'm at it, I have noticed that in Morph browser, it's not possible to share an URL: the menu entry (Share) exists, however clicking on it does nothing so it's not possible to create a web site icon with Webber (this works in 24.04-1.3)

@CiberSheep

the OONI report points that the decision of betting all on Cloudflare has downsides. Maybe use a mirroring strategy with another CDN ?

@PierreM

J'ai acheté un Fairphone 5 il y a maintenant 10 mois et je ne regrette pas l'achat, c'est un téléphone bien conçu et assez bien supporté par Ubuntu Touch.

Mais si j'achetais un téléphone maintenant je prendrais plus en compte l'alternative Volla.

Je n'avais pas retenu les téléphones non compatibles 5G et ça excluait tous les téléphones Volla sauf le Quintus. Celui-ci n'avait pas de batterie amovible et pour moi c'était aussi quelque chose d'essentiel.

Le Plinius a une batterie amovible et il fait la 5G donc il répond à mes besoins essentiels et il est fourni par une société qui supporte beaucoup plus UT que Fairphone.

Le point faible du Plinius est sa connexion USB limitée à USB 2 mais c'est pareil pour le FP6.

@Farmebrown

the trouble with using a talking electric heater as an advocacy helper is that it is making your thoughts look likely without proper basis.

In the case of your post, it is asking to Ubuntu Touch to provide an alternative to a Windows software called 'Windows phone link'. Why is this inappropriate ? because it is a desktop software. Ubuntu Touch is a phone software. Ubuntu Touch do not aim at being an alternative to Fedora, Debian Ubuntu...

If KDE Connect find this functionality out of scôpe, if no well known software phone exists on Linux that can do that with an Android phone, that's for a reason: it's because it's a marginal need for a market that is - if one takes 3% of the 1 billion users of desktop OS - about 30 million users.

If and when Linux desktop developers write such a software that can connect to an Android phone to do something equivalent to what you are asking, now it could be the moment to study why an UT phone could not be used instead of an Android phone.

I'd say that this hypothetical problem could probably be solved then entirely at the linux kernel level without any Ubuntu Touch application software. I think that the Ms software relies probably only on 'standard' Bluetooth features.

@mariogrip

FP5 build 137

Now it's the camera app that don't work anymore.
Like with the store, it's a missing library problem: libexiv2.so.27 called from libcamera-qml.so

26.04 provides libexiv2-28, but contrary to libicu74 there is a compatibility layer in 26.04: libexiv2-27-compat, but it's not installed.

I don't see why this breakage appears only now. Was this libexiv2-27-compat library included previously in the rootfs and not anymore ? I am not keen on the idea of a regression test by installing a previous version of Ubuntu Touch 26.04 to check on that.

Anyway, getting the library from the compat package and doing an overlay to add it to the system solves this particular problem.

gpatel-fr said:

libicudata.so.74

looking a bit more at this issue, this comes from the operating system upgrade: Ubuntu 24.04 comes with libicu74 while 26.04 uses libicu78.

Ubuntu 26.04 don't have libicu74, so don't seem to be able to use some binaries built for a previous Ubuntu version.

The use of snap in Ubuntu is something of a workaround for this problem I guess while click format was designed before the rise of snap/flatpak with their library packages.

@PhAndersson said:

Could it somehow be related to the fact that the clock is now reasonably synched?

I don't think so, for the following reasons:

• I did give you the hint about recreating the connection, and I don't have a mediatek device
• date problems for ssl come from the securing through a certificate infrastructure, that don't make much sense for Bluetooth, whose hacking radius is 10 meters vs 40000 km for standard internet networking
• updating certificates and certificates lists would be unfeasible for many Bluetooth devices that don't even have an Internet link

This said, if you want to try it out, it's easy: just re-enable the qualcomm time service and check again.

as noted in latest Q&A, in 26.04 alternate browsers running in XWayland are now displayed as any other app in the launcher, no more 'X' icon.

@kristatos

yes however logging happens at the generic journal level, there is no prefix to filter on. Entries are listed under 'aa-exec' and usually include the app name (ratatoskr) in the listed paths, you can try

journalctl -b | grep ratato

There is also logging done by obex that you can list using

systemctl --user -e -u obex

@kristatos

maybe doing some more tests.
I tried it again with my phone (FP5) setup with 24.04-1.3 stable and succeeded with receiving and sending test files.

However I have reproduced some of your problems.

Not the obex service not known. This was not happening for me.

I have seen the disconnection of Bluetooth happening though. Strangely the Bluetooth page for the device (an Android phone) was displaying the device as connected BUT with no signal, then disconnected very soon after (may seem logical given there was no signal).
I removed each phone from the Bluetooth configuration of both phones, tried again and this time the signal was rated 'excellent'. It then stayed connected. Needless to say, for all these tests the phones were sitting on a table very near of each other. It looks as if the state of connection is rated with 'no signal', it's staying so even if the real connection is good. In this case the pairing had been done much before and the phones had both been off or way to distant of each other to talk with Bluetooth.

After solving this connection problem, I think another trouble may be that if a transfer is not acknowledged by the receiving end, all following transfers fail. Not sure but it looks like that. This problem was happening with a transfer UT -> Android.
If my impression is correct, it may be a problem with the app (the connection problem mentioned before is probably more caused by the system bluetooth stack).