Battery life is usually less than expected due to unoptimized software and processors clocking too high. On my devices, I set the CPU governor to 'powersave', which reduces power usage but also performance.
There are multiple scaling governor settings which might not be available on all devices (depends on kernel configuration)

• performance : high frequency; slightly increased performance and battery consumption
• powersave : low frequency; reduced performance and superior batter life
• schedutil : changes according to the scheduler (default on my device)

This command list the available governors to set for each core (should be more than those I listed above)
sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_available_governors
Report which governors are currently selected for each core:
sudo cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor
Set the scaling governor to powersave to every core:
echo "powersave" | sudo tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

The commands above do not need mounting root as read-write, any change is reverted on reboot.
I tried to make an app for configuring these (a while ago) but I had trouble with sudo.

@captainfunk said in Ubuntu Touch Q&A 168 call for questions:

Are you thinking or planning to implement the screen rotation to 180 degrees ?

It depends on if the porter enabled it. The configuration file is located on /etc/deviceinfo/devices/<codename>.yaml. Taking the Volla X23 configuration file as a random example:

  SupportedOrientations:
    - Portrait
    - Landscape
    - InvertedLandscape

As you can see, there is no "InvertedPortrait" mode enabled. I don't know adding it below will work.

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Edit: (sorry, just noticed the Q&A was 3 days ago...)

It will also support mainline Linux (like the pinephone) as the patches have already been submitted: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fairphone-6-Linux.
I suppose the Ubuntu Touch port will be Halium based but it is certainly nice anyway.

@Twigg Many questions indeed, I will try to answer them as accurately as I can, so if anyone knows more, feel free to correct me.

Before answering your questions, I think it is necessary to clear any misconceptions about the Android kernel.
Most Android devices don't support mainline Linux, so the upstream kernel can't work on the device, as it is missing specific drivers and device trees. That is because the SoC manufacturers (Qualcomm/MediaTek) use an older kernel as a base to test their new designs, and that old kernel is subsequently used by the device manufacturers (e.g. Fairphone). Of course, neither of them bother isolating the changes to create a pull request to upstream Linux (due to costs etc.). As a result, Ubuntu Touch developers have to do extra patches to make the downstream patched kernel work for them.

Does you mean that the FF5 did not support mainline Linux?

Yes, Fairphone officially didn't, but the community has (see the PostmarketOS port)

Why the change with FF6?

I don't know. Maybe they hope they can attract more Linux enthusiast (like us).

I wonder about the advantages/disadvantages to using mainline Linux vs the Hallum approach

Mainline Linux enables more flexibility and a desktop-like experience. However, it is more difficult to make everything work there, postmarketOS is a great example, as almost none of their devices currently support the same hardware features as they did on Android. Not even Qualcomm themselves have succeeded in fully working mainline Linux kernel, as the recent Snapdragon X Elite chips which were made to compete with x86 still don't have full Linux support.

Halium on the other hand uses the same downstream kernel as Android does, with some adaptations for Ubuntu. It also runs the Android drivers on an LXC container, which allows easier access to hardware. As you can imagine, this has limitations, as we can't change the Android drivers and pulling patches from upstream Linux can break functionality.

I presume that this amounts to a desktop equivilence to doing a clean install of Ubuntu, vs installing it in Windows?

I don't get your analogy. It would be more accurate to say that to install normal Ubuntu, you have to reverse engineer the Windows drivers. However, in Ubuntu Touch's case we can reuse the Android drivers as the Linux kernel remains mostly the same.

From what I have read above, it looks like there haven't been too many changes from FF5 to FF6, so perhaps that makes it easier for Ubuntu Touch to get released on the FF6?

Each device needs its own port, sometimes even devices with the same chip require very different ports. In this case FP6 seems vastly different hardware-wise than FP5 so I don't think they would be similar software-wise.

@mihael In the same directory normal Debian-based distros with NetworkManager do:
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/WIFI_SSID.nmconnection

@ds2k5 You can enable the SSH server from UT tweak tool.

@Salah I believe it should work fine, as these icons neither large (to fill the partition) nor a dependency to something.
I had modified lomiri's qml by editing some files, and there wasn't any issue.
You can try, and if it fails reflash.

@wally Just ported the app to 20.04, changing icons works!
This is the new repository: https://gitlab.com/ikozyris/custom-phablet-tools,
I plan to publish it to the open store if it works for others as well.
Took me ~2 hours.
I might add a way to add custom icons, currently they are downloaded from https://framagit.org/ubuntouch-fr-dev/custom-phablet-tools/raw/media/icons/[APP-NAME.EXTENSION].

@Salah I'm currently rewriting the backend to not require remounting as read-write. Currently this arm64 focal .click works. Screenshot:

@Salah said in Customizing Icons:

If you go to icons folder, you well see several icon folder with icons including the main one which if officially used (suru) and they are not used.

These are available if you click on the top-left icon. Select one from the list

Salah said in Customizing Icons:

have installed it, which apparently not available in Open Store

I submitted the app to the OpenStore, but I was suggested to rewrite the scripts so they don't require remounting the rootfs as read-write. I have made some progress, and the icon names had to be renamed. So the old versions don't work, unless it fetches the icons from a snapshot of a previous version. I can easily fix the hacky version temporary to work fully, but better way for the newer, cleaner method, which is WIP.

Salah said in Customizing Icons:

Is there any way I can Add my icons to this app !!

Yes, you have to rename your icons to match the names of those in the repo. Put them in a folder. Then write that path (absolute path and the last /) in the text box below

@foxx This is getting very off topic, politics are not that related to the issue. I never said that you cannot use your camera, it just has to be interfaced through Halium. You can quickly make an app with Qt that captures frames from the camera, and maybe use the Qt Networking framework to broadcast.

@foxx said in How to use camera via terminal v4l on Pixel 3A:

Canonical tried to push Unity using pretty useless Ubuntu Touch, when actual problem was on hardware manufacturers' incentives layer to make unified drivers, so some organization could make actual linux, not gnomes and package managers without underlying layer.

That's why they wanted to become the manufacturers themselves and started crowdfunding Ubuntu Edge, which would have been an awesome device but it never reached its funding target.

Probably government could oblige manufacturers to provide drivers , which should comply with some POSIX

People don't understand any of these. Politicians not only don't care about privacy, standards etc, but are busy pushing those stupid laws forbidding end-to-end encryption, I wouldn't expect anything from them.

The world is far from perfect and it will always be like that, so you have to make compromises.

@foxx How does termux work better? Even if you have a rooted device, you still aren't using the familiar GNU/Linux stack. Termux is still an emulator, it modifies the syscalls, and you don't have access to every directory.

In UT you can do everything you would on a desktop Linux distro but it is more difficult, mainly due to relying on hardware abstraction.
The only solution to this is using an upstream kernel with complete driver support. This is however a much harder task than the already hard porting process. PostmarketOS does that, and that's why almost none of their devices work fully.

All manufacturers should mainline their device drivers but none do, instead they use ancient downstream (often bugged) kernels so they can release their product quicker (and cheaper).
There are exceptions such as the Pinephone(s), which have full mainline kernel support, and allow using devices such as camera in the same way as in a normal Linux device.

In my view, Ubuntu Touch does solve a problem. It is the closest you can currently get to a normal GNU/Linux system, while retaining the phone's intended functionality (telephony, camera, etc).

@foxx You can only see cameras through Qt, see this post for more details.

@Charly Snap doesn't make sense for these small standalone utilites. Also fdisk doesn't exist as snap and rsync packages are only some outdated third party programs, which I would never install.

@LITTLEFisky It could be something with your environment, have you tried using installing with another Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu)? It can work from a VM or live USB.

The "cannot read data from undefined" seems like an issue reported from JavaScript, that's why I'm saying it's an issue on your environment.

@Charly The first time you open the shell (through ssh) it says "the system has been minimized", which was done to reduce the rootfs size. You can use these programs under Libertine or run a local build of them (preferably statically linked).

@LITTLEFisky I was able to install UT on an UsU unlocked device (see this post) without an issue. Have you tried another distro? The errors seem to be unrelated to the installer.

@arubislander IIRC, all desktop apps based on a framework other than Qt are currently uconfined, but Mir 2 should fix that (see the discussion around the problem for uWolf).
If it were unconfined just to access the filesystem directly (without content hub), it would use the separate read/write access policy.

@mr_growl If you disable requiring password to login (just swipe to unlock), it will also disable encryption.

But just running the fastboot command will work (if it throws any error, it likely means your fastboot build is broken and you'll have to use the official one from Google).