Hi all,
I've written a few notes about my plans to add CardDav support to Ubports in the ubports-dev mailing list:

https://list.ubports.com/pipermail/ubports-dev/2018-March/000005.html

Ciao,
Alberto

Hi there!
During the past weeks I've been working on a complete rewrite of the media-hub service (the client library is, for the time being, untouched) to port it from a hard to maintain codebase which was using the unmaintained dbus-cpp library and heavy threading, to an event-driven, single-threaded application (if we exclude GStreamer's own threading, of course, but that's well hidden behind GStreamer's APIs) mostly written using Qt classes.

I've tried hard not to change the D-Bus API, and — at least for now — I've kept most of the program logic exactly the same as it was before. I've done my part of testing, and I solved all the issues I've found so far, but given the magnitude of the changes it's likely that I've still left some bugs in there.

So, to those who love risk, I'll be grateful if you'll find some time to test it. There's only one package that needs to be installed, and it's the media-hub_4.6.2*.deb package from the CI page; just make sure to download the correct one for your architecture. To install it, run

sudo mount -o remount,rw /
sudo dpkg -i media-hub_4.6.2*.deb

and then reboot your device. If you encounter issues, please report them replying to this thread or adding a comment to the merge request, providing the ~/.cache/upstart/media-hub.log file and, if possible, also the file bustle.log obtained by keeping the command

busctl --user monitor  core.ubuntu.media.Service > bustle.log

running while reproducing the issue.

Hello everybody

I'm glad to announce that on November 2nd I'll be giving a presentation of Ubports at the 4th Linux Piter conference, which will be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The sessions will be recorded, and I'll update this thread with a link to the video, once it gets published (approximately one week after the event).

The audience, as far as I've understand, will for the most part be composed by IT experts which work on different fields than mobile phones, but I still hope that some of them will become curious about our project.

Time will tell

Hi all!
Today I uploaded a new version of account-polld in the ubports overlay PPA, which as far as I understand will be used to create the image for the "devel" channel.
account-polld is a background process which is always running in your device, and which gets waken up every 5 minutes to check if you have new notifications from your online services. At the moment, it supports gmail, twitter, google-calendar, caldav and dekko (gmail accounts only). This new version doesn't change anything of that, but takes a few steps towards the plan to allow click packages to install their own account-polld plugins.

In this version, account-polld has been completely rewritten: it has moved from being a monolithic binary written in go to a slimmer Qt/C++ service which runs the plugins as separate processes, on demand. For simplicity, the existing plugins have been reused and are still written in go, but they could be written in any language (they could even be shell scripts!).

Even though this version doesn't offer noticeable changes for the end user, you might be happy to know that the memory footprint of account-polld has decreased, as reported by top. Before:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 3391 phablet   20   0  919520  12764   8896 S   0,0  1,3   0:00.89 account-polld

and after:

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 2979 phablet   20   0   60368   6328   5448 S   0,0  0,6   0:00.20 account-polld

It's just a few megabytes (look at the RES column, and keep in mind these are kilobytes), but on embedded devices every byte counts.

Testing!

The new account-polld has been tested and approved while I was still working in Canonical, but things were moving slowly and we never managed to land it. So, it may be that it hides some dragons
I myself use only the gmail plugin, and I've verified that it's working. Notifications for dekko don't appear to be working, but OTOH I haven't seen them with the old account-polld either. If you are on the devel channel or have a writable filesystem (install account-polld and account-polld-plugins-go from the PPA) please give these new packages a try and report any regressions.

Last but not least, the code for these projects is here:

• https://github.com/mardy/account-polld
• https://github.com/mardy/account-polld-plugins-go

Note: the instructions in this post are for expert users only, or for those who don't mind having to reflash their device if something goes wrong.

---

Hi there!
I've lately been working on a native application to watch videos from Youtube and other online services, without ads.

While the application works on the desktop, in Ubuntu Touch it's totally non functional because the media-hub component supports local media files only.

After some hacking on the media-hub and qtubuntu-media I got the videos to play, even though the application is still far from stable.

You can see a video here: https://youtu.be/wTygEsa_Er4

Now I want to have my patches to media-hub reviewed, but first I need to be relatively sure that they don't introduce regressions. The same component is responsible for playing videos and audio files, so both the Media player and the Music app need to be thoroughly tested.

If you'd like to help, please install this PPA in your device, which can be done by running the following command from a terminal in the device:

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_remotemedia

This should force the update of the media-hub and qtubuntu-media packages; if that's not happening, another option is to just download the deb files for armhf from here and here and install them manually with dpkg. After doing that, issue the command

initctl restart media-hub

or (better) restart your device, and verify (with the media player and music applications, mainly) that there are no regressions.

You can then install the MiTubo click package and try to play some videos from Youtube (following the steps I did in the video linked before), keeping in mind that this could crash and not working reliably. But what I'm mostly interested in knowing is that existing device functionality is not being broken.

Ciao,
Alberto

Hi there, I just released a VNC client application which I built using clickable + QBS, probably the only build system which I like.

I wrote a blog post to announce it, but while writing the post, I realized that there was some information that a developer could find useful, so I'm copying that here:

Development of a UBports Qt/QML app with QBS

If, like me, you are a fan of QBS, you might want to have a look at the source code of CuteVNC (yes, the project was born as "Lomiri VNC", but since it's a generic QtQuick.Controls 2 application, there was no need to tie it to the Lomiri environment); there you can find a QBS module for UBports applications, which can help in filling in the manifest file and deploying other Ubuntu Touch specific files into their proper install location.

You can also see the configuration file to make clickable build a QBS-based project. In my mental task backlog I still have the idea of making clickable support QBS out of the box, but the integration of the two technologies is so easy even now, that I gave this task a quite low priority.

A class for computing viewport transformations

Last but not least, a developer might find useful the generic Scaler class I wrote to compute the viewport transformations: it's a simple, QtGui-only C++ class which takes an input structure with the viewport information, and returns a similar structure containing a QTransform matrix to map item coordinates to coordinates in the source object coordinates (in my case, the source object is the remote screen served by VNC) and some other useful parameters, such as the scale, center offset, and the painted area rectangle.

The class has a 100% line and branch coverage in the unit tests, so I hope I can rely on it.

@joelandsonja said in Pinephone Rant:

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see more than 50 other phones on the 'supported devices list' that are leagues ahead of the Pinephone, especially when you consider the fact that the Pinephone was made specifically to support the Linux community and it feels like it's being ignored by the developers.

The problem is that the PinePhone is very different from the other devices we support, so even though it is in many ways the best device we could work on, in practice we have much more experience working on Android-based devices, whereas for the PP we have to redo many things from scratch.

I don't mean to sound so rude, but how long are we expected to wait to see some progress?

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that in the next OTA, if everything goes as planned, two PP-specific bugs will be fixed:

• https://github.com/ubports/media-hub/issues/29
• https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-system-settings-online-accounts/issues/11

It's a drop in the ocean, I know, but this is just to let you know that we haven't forgotten about it - and I don't even have a PP myself.

Hi there!
I've been working on a few branches (you can find all the links here) to allow applications which are actively using the location service to continue running in the background, and therefore continue receiving location updates.

If you'd like to help testing this, please run

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_locationbg

on your phone, then reboot, and have fun

Please report any issues (including shortning battery life!) by adding a comment to this merge request.

Ciao,
Alberto

At the moment, the project has identified itself as ubports: this site, the github repos, the patreon page, it's always "ubports".
I think that if we want to move constructively, we should take one step at a time and instead of immediately proposing new names, decide whether we want to keep "ubports" or change. If we decide to change, then we'll have a chance to think of a different name.

As for myself, I'm all for changing. "ubports" is just a nightmare to pronounce, and to most people (even geeks) it means nothing -- the link to Ubuntu is far from being evident. Besides, the "ports" suffix reminds of porting, but the project now has grown into something considerably bigger than that: it's a full O.S. which we'll be maintaining ourselves.

Hi all!
I've found the github group for ubports and I see that there are a few repositories in there. However, it's not clear to me where the various bits of code are. For instance:

1. How is the image generated? Where can I find the list of debian/click packages preinstalled in the image?
2. Where are the actual packages taken from? Are they taken from some PPA as it was the case for Canonical images, or how?
3. In the community Q&A, it was mentioned that A-GPS support was added; where can I see the change in the code which enabled that?

I hope that these questions will help me and other people who want to contribute

@joelandsonja said in Pinephone Rant:

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to see more than 50 other phones on the 'supported devices list' that are leagues ahead of the Pinephone, especially when you consider the fact that the Pinephone was made specifically to support the Linux community and it feels like it's being ignored by the developers.

The problem is that the PinePhone is very different from the other devices we support, so even though it is in many ways the best device we could work on, in practice we have much more experience working on Android-based devices, whereas for the PP we have to redo many things from scratch.

I don't mean to sound so rude, but how long are we expected to wait to see some progress?

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that in the next OTA, if everything goes as planned, two PP-specific bugs will be fixed:

• https://github.com/ubports/media-hub/issues/29
• https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-system-settings-online-accounts/issues/11

It's a drop in the ocean, I know, but this is just to let you know that we haven't forgotten about it - and I don't even have a PP myself.

@thomas-k8s said in Qemu-kvm or QEMU on ubuntu touch?:

Hi all, does anyone have any experiences for that? Or simply test it for this options

If you mean running QEMU on Ubuntu Touch, then Alan's aswer is the right one. If you mean running Ubuntu Touch using QEMU, then it should be possible, I gave it a try long ago and unity8 was popping up, but I couldn't figure out how to tell QEMU to use a specific screen size, so it was nearly unusable. And I don't remember which was the command line I used

@aloys said in Component.onDestruction not called when closing app (QML with C++ plugin):

In fact, not so simple! I just discover another unexpected behavior.
I use Settings to save status of the game, and when adding saving on signal AboutToQuit(), the file (taquin.aloysliska.conf) is not updated.

Try also calling settings.sync(), that should help.

Please note that the Qt.application.active signal is also emitted when the application simply goes to the foreground. If you need to save some data, it's indeed a good idea to do it at that time, since you don't know whether the application will later be killed.

But if you really need to know when the application is being closed, then Qt.application has an aboutToQuit() signal which you can listen to via a Connections element.

@stanwood said in Open Ubuntu Touch to all Android applications !:

Use now your favourite Android applications on your Vollaphone with Ubuntu Touch!

Can you please let me know if the patches I added to the Redmi Note 7 Pro (violet) kernel are enough to get Anbox working?

They are the last 4 in https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-ports/android9/xiaomi-redmi-note-7-pro/kernel-xiaomi-violet/-/commits/halium-9.0-anbox10/

OK, now the PPA seems ready

Please test it again, and sorry for the previous glitch!

Thanks @cliffcoggin ! I realized just now that not all the packages made it to the PPA: the lomiri changes are not there, and they are essential to get this functionality working fine. I'm still trying to understand what is the correct branch to use for lomiri, and then I'll rebuild the package. I'll keep you guys posted!

For the time being, better not use this PPA, as it's incomplete.

@applee said in Call for testing: background location updates:

Can you tell us more about how to test and how it works ?
Simply because and app is using the location it won't go to sleep after timeout or shutting down the screen, is that it ?

Yes. Replying to both:

@cliffcoggin said in Call for testing: background location updates:

I too am interested in such an application. What advantage does it have over preventing suspension with UT Tweak Tool?

This is not an application, but a set of changes to the OS itself. It mainly consists of two parts:

1. The location service exposes a list of the application ID which are currently receiving location updates
2. Lomiri (new name for unity8) monitors that list, and sets the LifecycleExemption flag on those applications; the flag is removed when the application requests to stop receiving location updates.

So, it is similar to what the UT Tweak tool does, except that this is automatic, and lasts only for as long as the application is using the GPS.

This is just the first iteration: in the future, we would like to have it so that when an app requests access to the GPS, the user is given the choice between granting the permission to receive such updates in the background, or only when in the foreground.

Hi there!
I've been working on a few branches (you can find all the links here) to allow applications which are actively using the location service to continue running in the background, and therefore continue receiving location updates.

If you'd like to help testing this, please run

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_locationbg

on your phone, then reboot, and have fun

Please report any issues (including shortning battery life!) by adding a comment to this merge request.

Ciao,
Alberto

@phoenixlandpirat Thanks!
Since you have a PinePhone, could you please also test if https://github.com/ubports/media-hub/issues/29 is still happening with this version?