Hey guys, I just need a little help

I'm looking for mine, do you know which one it is?

source

In the Q&A Dalton and Florian talked about some of the difficulties with summarizing a "this week in news".

So why don't we crowd source the news?

We could have a centralized document, be it on a eitherpad, nextcloud, or even Hackdb, it needs to be something that anyone can edit, but saves every change so that if someone does anything malicious we can just role it back.

Eitherpad is well used in the UBports community for notes so I think it might be a good idea to do this here.

Ideally it'd be sectioned off with core system updates, app updates, etc, and any news you do have to update us with, ideally it would have a title, quick to read, a description, and then a link to the source, for verification, or in-case of a possible misunderstanding.

I made a pad to give an idea of how it could look, this is a community thing so please contribute and we can try to make it as good as possible and create a good standard!

https://pad.ubports.com/p/weekly

@Lakotaubp said in "UbuntuTouch" name:

@tigerpro I'm afraid calling it “Ultimate Touch” might attract the wrong sort of attention : )

Super Smash Bros Ultimate Touch.

Personally I'm not a big fan of the idea, to me it seems far to android-y.

I like Ubuntu touch because it's Ubuntu touch, and I like it's personality.

I don't mind some ideas, but I do much prefer the style of homepage that I've seen before.

I'll try and find it, but it looked a bit like the today scope, except only had the weather and some apps.

Personally, I think the homescreen would be nice if it you could edit a bit more, if you could have your weather, your row of apps, your row of music or friends or what ever you want, but I think it needs to keep the unique feel, I think if it wants to, it can be a bit more KDE or gnome inspired.

There's a Android launcher which basically adds the windows 10 start button to your phone, I don't mind it, as it feels decent to me, but it's just windows 10 styled, I think we would be better imitating that, as it seems more like our kind of feeling than Android default.

Another problem I see, is that you swipe from the left to get your launcher, then you pull it all the way to get home, then you pull down from the bottom to access all apps.

The app draw means, you pull it from left to right slightly, you have your pinned apps, you pull it more and you have all your apps.

It's quicker and more responsive, it might not be editable at the moment, but my opinion is that, you've got the coding skills, I bet you could make the app draw look and feel amazing and add new ability's to it, and make it keep it in the feeling and style of Ubuntu touch.

That's just my opinion on the matter.

Did someone say pinephone?! How is the progress with the pinephone? What things will be fixed, or will still be broken when we move to the new kernel?

With qt 5.12 and the Lomiri work with manjaro, will we see more cross platform app development? Will we see more click apps on the manjaro base, will we see more plasma apps on Ubuntu Touch, etc, or will there still be to many differences, such as Ubuntus life cycle, and that some kde apps (neochat for example) and Manjaro using qt 5.15, and different package management on different platforms?

Are there efforts between different projects, to try and minimise fragmentation?

@AppLee said in PineTab Anyone?:

But people usually use the back camera more...

On a Tablet?

I don't think most people go around taking photos with there tablets, I think people want better front cameras, because on a tablet you're more likely to use it, when you're video calling family or friends, you know.

What we have:

• Signal
  Theres a beta app called axolotl, which allows conversations over the signal protocal
  https://open-store.io/app/textsecure.nanuc

• Dekko
  Dekko does have multi-account support
  https://open-store.io/app/dekko2.dekkoproject

• GPS
  we have the feature, IDK how well it works, depends on device I guess, but wont be as accurate as Google.

• Nextcloud
  We have multiple apps for Nextcloud, we have a news app, notes app, calendar, and some others, however we have no full sync option, you cant for example sync your music folder to your nextcloud account.

• adblock
  We have a separate app for ad blocking, this means every ad in every app will be blocked however, it doesn't allow you to pick and choose which apps or websites get a free pass.
  https://open-store.io/app/uadblock.mariogrip

What doesnt work.

• Whatsapp
  There are only 3 ways to message people using whatsapp on Ubuntu Touch, but both require having whatsapp on a android or ios device. One way is by using a whatsapp webapp, which wont give you notifications, or you could set up a matrix bridge, which would give you notifications via fluffychat, but it'd cost you, and you'd have to set it up,

Theres also the option of anbox, but thats more of a future plan for android apps on Ubuntu Touch.
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1676/development-testers-for-anbox

• Syncing
  we have no app that syncs/backups, this is partially due to background services and confinement not being flexible enough to allow for a syncing app in the OpenStore.

For device specifics, I couldn't tell you how well any of them work, I only have a OPO and OP3 running Ubuntu Touch.

There has been some more interest in Podbird and what we should do with it moving forward, it was suggested to make a forum post about it so thats what this forums about!

Now that we have arm64 builds in the ubports installer, it's a lot easier for people to install and test arm64 applications.

If anyone has any apps they'd like to be tested on arm64 please reply here with a file/link to a file.

This may also be a good place to talk about hurdles compiling apps for arm64.

Thanks you

@olddh
Its okay to ask questions, its okay to voice concerns, but damn, try and run Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 5 running Linux 5.10, and Wayland, and you'll be in a much worse state then Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone.

Like, you would have a brick if you tried to do anything like the PinePhone with the Nexus 5 because its probably more than double the amount of work, but also, its very dismissive of all the actual work that people like Dalton have put into the project, like, maybe you have to have a good eye, but everyone works extremely hard on the Ubuntu Touch project, and UBports has put in a HUGE amount of effort to support the PinePhone, more effort has absolutely been put into the PinePhone than the Nexus 5 by the core team.

I dont know if you realize this, but its rare that the Nexus 5, OPO, FairPhone, even OP3 get device specific updates, a lot of the time, they get ported, and then left alone until something breaks them, or there's something that hasn't worked for a while and someones just decided to work on it for a bit.

Anyways the whole team needs a break, they all need time off, a good week or so time of rest, to do whatever be that bowling, going for walks, just sleeping, watching movies, or playing video games, they deserve a lot for what they do and have been able to do, and the amount of work thats gone into the PinePhone is, well, commendable!

The PinePhone doesn't show up in your file manager to back up your data or to move folders and files to your phone, however you can mount the file system by turning off the PinePhone and then turning it back on while holding the volume up button, you'll then see.

• scr
• persist
• boot_a
• recovery_a
• cache
• system
• userdata
• Removable Media (How this displays depends on a multitude of variables)

Backing up with Linux Bash

The mount point may be different depending on your system, or if you manually mount it elsewhere, so please note that my commands are based on where Manjaro automatically mounts the device.

cd /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/

Here's where all your files and folders are, for me these folders said they belonged to a number, so I just ran chown, this is a bad idea, but it works, if you chown your . files you'll need to chown them back to the old owner, I am not so sure if thats the case with basic files and folders.

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER *

ScreenShots and Photos Using Exiftool and Rsync

To move my ScreenShots I cd into the ScreenShot directory

exiftool -r -d /home/$USER/Images/ScreenShot/%Y/%m/ "-filename<filemodifydate" *

This uses exiftool to recursively (-r) look through your directory's which you shouldn't need unless you've already moved your screenshots around adding them to different folders, /home/$USER/Images/ScreenShot/ tells exiftool to move the screenshots to that directory, by default images and ScreenShots aren't default folders, many users put ScreenShots in the Pictures directory, so you may want to change that.

%Y/%m/ tells exiftool to make the directorys based on the Year and Month, you can also add day, but for me there would only be a screnshot or at max maybe 5 a day and would make it hard to look for those images, so Months are just fine.

"-filename<filemodifydate" this tells exiftool to base the %Y and %m on the date it was last modified, if you chose to do it by Created or Accessed it would give you the date and time that you mounted the directory.

For Photos I use a similar set of commands, however I want to move my photos to the SD card to free up storage as well as have a copy on my desktop, my SD card mounts as 79C1-218E please alter that to your SD card mount.

cd /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/Pictures/com.ubuntu.camera/
exiftool -r -d /run/media/$USER/79C1-218E/Pictures/%Y/%m/ "-filename<filemodifydate" *
rsync -av /run/media/$USER/79C1-218E/Pictures/ $HOME/Pictures/

Backup Your Dots.

your dot files also belong to phablet, and so you'll have to either use chmod or chown to be able to back them up.
please make sure you make note of the number that you're given for the user before you change it.

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER .*

This is uncomfortable but I'm not advanced enough to chmod without breakages or without worrying about making my device less secure, so please make sure you take note of the number it belongs to, as if you want your device to work afterwards you'll have to chown it back to that owner.

Backup ALL The Files (on user-data), With Tar.

If you only want to do a quick and easy archive backup, this isn't the most recommended organization wise and can waist storage, and just isn't the best for a system thats always changing, but it works using tar (you can also use rsync if you want them to be viewable and editable to you on your desktop)

I'm just gonna place it on my desktop for now.

tar -czvf $HOME/Desktop/PinePhoneBak.tar.gz /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/.* /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/*

Restoring With Tar

(please note, I have not restored a device using this command so something may go wrong, you may have to restore using a mounted archive OR use some other work around to make the restoration work if the command doesn't work as expected.)

tar -xzvf $HOME/Desktop/PinePhoneBak.tar.gz -C /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/*

Backup ALL The Files (on user-data) With Restic

Backup using restic, this is a fantastic way of backing up data, it allows for encrypted backups, that's easy to automate, and means you don't have to worry about data being lost, the problem with tar is that you either overwrite old back ups or add extra weight you don't need, rsync doesn't have that problem, but it just copy's the folders, rsync also doesn't let you revert to older versions of the backup, unlike restic.

restic is also a fast backup since it only backs up the new and updated files.

Create a folder for your restic backup, you'll want a folder because restic by default creates 5 directory's and a config

restic init --repo /home/$USER/Desktop/PineBackUp/

it'll ask you for a password, you'll need to enter one!

Then you'll want to make the backup

restic -r /home/$USER/Desktop/PineBackUp/ --verbose backup /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/

Restoring/Viewing Using Restic.

(please note, I have not restored a device using this command so something may go wrong, you may have to restore using a mounted restic snapshot OR use some other work around to make the restoration work if the command doesn't work as expected.)

To restore from the latest snapshot you would use.

restic -r /home/$USER/Desktop/PineBackUp/  restore latest --target /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/

to see whats in your snapshot without restoring you can mount your restic backup using a few commands. you'll have to make a directory for the snapshot and then mount it, however you cannot edit anything.

mkdir $USER/restic
restic -r  /home/$USER/Desktop/PineBackUp/ mount $USER/restic

Chmod your Dots (!IMPORTANT!)

This is very important, if you boot your phone now, you wont have any apps, your system will be broken in a few ways, this is because the wrong person owns the files, fix that using. (please note your number may be different)

cd /run/media/$USER/userdata/user-data/phablet/
sudo chown -R $32011:$32011 .*

I am planning to update this with some powershell commands, so that our windows users can also back up there files, if they wish, however I don't have a windows computer, so I'll be using powershell for linux some of the commands might not translate to windows properly so if a windows user would like to help with that, that would be a pleasure, if anyone would like to.

I would also like to make a backup tutorial for anything that is important in the configs, such as text message history, installed apps, and just basic lomiri config files, I'm aware of where text message history is, but other configs I'll need to find.

Thank you for your time, I hope this has been helpful!

In the Q&A Dalton and Florian talked about some of the difficulties with summarizing a "this week in news".

So why don't we crowd source the news?

We could have a centralized document, be it on a eitherpad, nextcloud, or even Hackdb, it needs to be something that anyone can edit, but saves every change so that if someone does anything malicious we can just role it back.

Eitherpad is well used in the UBports community for notes so I think it might be a good idea to do this here.

Ideally it'd be sectioned off with core system updates, app updates, etc, and any news you do have to update us with, ideally it would have a title, quick to read, a description, and then a link to the source, for verification, or in-case of a possible misunderstanding.

I made a pad to give an idea of how it could look, this is a community thing so please contribute and we can try to make it as good as possible and create a good standard!

https://pad.ubports.com/p/weekly

The PinePhone is getting increasingly better and better, the UBports software has made calling and texting much better, and more stable, however there seems to be a limit on how good it can get, not from the Ubuntu side, or the hardware side, but from the firmware pre-installed, how good can the call and messaging features get with the pre-installed firmware, and what seems to be the overall thougths on upgrading the modems firmware, or installing the open source firmware from Biktorgj

@totalsonic the source code is on gitlab, added 4 days ago so it looks like you'll be able to interface with InfiniTime sometime in the not to distant future!

on the forum it says "Sync firmware" works, but it also says "sync battery" which just means the app displays the battery, so i cant with confidence assume that that means that you can update the watch with the app currently or any time in the near future.

https://gitlab.com/jiiho/uwatch

@totalrando adb is usually a part of android tools, if you just install adb, i think you should be fine.

@totalrando Might be blind but I see no smack talk on us or Anbox here.

@rocky58 last time the old notification design on the welcome screen was brought up (i assume the media play back stuff would act as a notification bubble on the welcome screne) florian said it woud take a huge rewrite, and you might have to break thjngs beforwe they worked properly.

If its something you have the skills to do then Ill happily try and find the old canonical design documentation for you.

@opolork IDK how that one works particularly, but for anything like that, currently I'm using PCP, it's command line, but it works fairly nicely, I think it'd be nice if someone would make a nice gui front end for ubuntu touch but it doesn't take much to use in the terminal.

https://github.com/dennis-tra/pcp

@olddh
Its okay to ask questions, its okay to voice concerns, but damn, try and run Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 5 running Linux 5.10, and Wayland, and you'll be in a much worse state then Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone.

Like, you would have a brick if you tried to do anything like the PinePhone with the Nexus 5 because its probably more than double the amount of work, but also, its very dismissive of all the actual work that people like Dalton have put into the project, like, maybe you have to have a good eye, but everyone works extremely hard on the Ubuntu Touch project, and UBports has put in a HUGE amount of effort to support the PinePhone, more effort has absolutely been put into the PinePhone than the Nexus 5 by the core team.

I dont know if you realize this, but its rare that the Nexus 5, OPO, FairPhone, even OP3 get device specific updates, a lot of the time, they get ported, and then left alone until something breaks them, or there's something that hasn't worked for a while and someones just decided to work on it for a bit.

Anyways the whole team needs a break, they all need time off, a good week or so time of rest, to do whatever be that bowling, going for walks, just sleeping, watching movies, or playing video games, they deserve a lot for what they do and have been able to do, and the amount of work thats gone into the PinePhone is, well, commendable!

@ubuntoutou As long as the note files are still there, go to the terminal

cd .local/share/com.ubuntu.reminders/@local

This is where all your notes are stored, to get content of the notes out you will need to type this to (this will miss all the nicetys like titles and will merge all the notes into one, so keep that in mind).

cat *info | grep tagline | awk -f= '{print $2}' >> $HOME/Documents/notes.txt

Then you can just cd into your Documents directory and cat note.txt and it should have all your notes, it'll be a bit of a mess and you'll have to format it a bit to look nice, but that SHOULD work.