Posts made by Mark

@Mark Brian Douglas now has an experimental open store for multi arch which worked well for me on the Pi. The Telegram UBports Raspberry Pi group is a good place to follow progress.

I know this is about the Raspberry Pi 4 but if any of you, frustrated with the lack of progress, have a Raspberry Pi 3 you may want to try that as it is working reasonably well but with bugs that could do with some attention. Solving them should, in many cases, also help with the Pi 4 once the (compositor?) bug is fixed. Some of the existing UT apps have been recompiled for arm64 so we have working file manager and UT Tweak amongst others. The Telegram group has instructions to add Swap which makes life a lot easier.

Less a question for our too busy main developers (who have been very supportive) than for the wider community. The work on the Pinephone and the ports to arm64 phones has helped get us an image that launches on the Raspberry Pi and software to use on it. However we still need help to get it more useable, particularly on the Pi 4 where the extra RAM should make it a great little development platform for Ubuntu Touch (OS and Apps).

Does any one out there have the time and the skills to help take this forward? There seems to be a good few Linux users with some skills, a Raspberry Pi and a commitment to UT but whose developer skills are not up to finding if a problem is, say, related to the Wayland compositor then working out how we fix that. Whilst this isn't (and shouldn't be) a main focus for the UBports community I believe getting this working well will boost the other arm64 work, help show we are not restricted to a handful of old phones and get us some good publicity.

Even on the Pi 3 Ubuntu Touch is a joy to use, particularly on the 7" touchscreen. I'd happily watch today's Q&A on it if I'd got the skills to get sound playing from the Morph browser in time .

Would the approach taken here (with Gentoo running arm64 including camera, sound and display) work for us or is it too far from the way UT works? https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit

@Mark The work on preparing UT apps for other arm64 platforms gives us something to work with now. The UT Tweak Tool seems to work reasonably as does TELEports and File Manager. I can get sound output from the terminal but not through the apps. Mouse behaviour is a little odd and seems to deteriorate - most of my experience is on the Touchscreen which seems more stable and easier to use. Adding Swap has been helpful, particularly when having multiple open tabs on the Morph Browser. If someone can get to the bottom of the (compositor?) issue with the Pi4 the resource related issues should be much reduced, particulatly with the 2 and 4 GB versions.

I realised that that post may look like I'm claiming some credit and that would be wrong.
Early on I did some blundering about in the dark and kept posting about my inevitable failures to encourage someone who knew what they were doing to help - that is the sum total of my contribution

I'm writing this on Ubuntu Touch running on a Raspberry Pi 3 using the OSK on the Pi 7" touchscreen.
Thanks for the hard work put in. There are some issues still of course. Something odd with the graphics in Pi 4 windows and a slight overlap on the touch screen making left or right swipes tricky but this feels so much closer to useable than the first image. I don't think it is too far now from a platform that will showcase convergence and perhaps even let us develop apps live. I appreciate this is a side project so the UBports developers can't make it a high priority. Hopefully though the work done will help towards getting other Arm64 non-Android ports running smoothly. As a long term Linux user - trying to help get Unity8 or UBports working on the Pi has been very humbling - I'd no idea how little I knew/know!

Good to see great progress.
Using the latest image the Pi4 boots and runs well although a graphics issue means that you can't read anything opened in a window.
Scaling is now sorted on the monitor and when using the 7 inch touch screen.
The graphics issue does not affect the Pi3 but it is (understandably) frustratingly slow.
The touch screen worked on the first image but not on the most recent one. UPDATE It woked after a reboot but as the left and right edges are slightly offscreen it restricts its usefuleness.
UT on the Raspberry Pi feels much closer now to something that will work. Thanks to those who understand all this far more than me for putting the work in.

In a few days I will have a Pi4 (4GB). At the moment I can run Marius' image on my Pi3 although the scaling is out (on a HDMI montor and on the 7" Pi touch screen) and it tends to freeze when the browser is run. I got a wee bit stuck until I realised "phablet" was the passcode it asked for

@advocatux Thanks - oh and apologies for re-opening a too old thread elsewhere

This sort of info would help those of us hoping to find a way of getting it running on the Raspberry Pi as well.

I have a touch screen for my Raspberry Pi. Ubuntu Touch is well designed for touch screen, small screens and low spec devices. Plus UT running natively on a Pi opens up a huge potential development base.

Is there a place where UT progress and dead ends with the Pinephone are being documented? I find there is so much posted in the Pinephone group on Telegram and a lot of it is not UT specific so I don't follow it as much as I should. I'd still like to know more and try to apply it to the Pi.

@Flohack If you don't know there is not much chance of me knowing I knew my way around programing (machine code) the old Sinclair ZX81 but other than maintaining a basic website or two over the years and keeping our linux computers at home updated and working I've let that side of my knowledge get very rusty in the intervening 35+ years. I really appreciate the effort you folks are putting into maintaining and developing this OS. I use my phone daily and hope, when it finally gets too old, that there will be a good open source OS to run on my next one. Preferably UBPorts.

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense with my old BQ4.5 as full websites are ungainly at best. However as we move towards convergence then we may need the option to be able to select between a desktop or a mobile browser depending on what we want to do. Not that there is an urgent need for that now.

@Flohack list.Thanks for your reply. I have in the past had a good response from developers at the BBC regarding Linux compatibility. I wondered whether some websites demand an Android app because of something in UBPorts identifying the browser as running on Android or simply because that was their default assumption if we were not identified on their list.

@guru thanks for that.
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.0; Nexus 5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.102 Mobile Safari/537.36
Is this something we can edit?

Sites like the BBC contain multimedia that runs fine on Linux using HTML5. However trying to access things like BBC iPlayer radio or TV on my BQ4.5 fails as the website demands that I have to install the Android App. Any way of getting around this? By which I mean persuading websites to allow the HTML5 to be run by changing what they see as evidence that we are running Android not how do we get the App installed.

Could you have been caught up in the recent huge EE outage? I've got two sims fron different providers and they both seem to work fine before and after the recent update and the change over to UBports.