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Hi,
I just wrote a PDF reader based on Chromium PDF engine.
It's pretty dummy, written in 30 minutes. But quite useful (at least for me) given the limitations of Document viewer, and that sturmreader is currently broken on noble.
I think it will greatly benefit from Qt6 upgrade, when it comes, because of improvement of the engine in chromium.
It is published in the openstore:
https://github.com/pparent76/chromiumpdf
Regards,
Pierre.
I've succeeded in opening the keyboard when editing text in signal-desktop !!!! 
I could do it reusing the work of @ChromiumOS-Guy in uWolf!
I can officially send signal messages from a native Ubuntu Touch app, without Waydroid! 
Even though for now it's not convenient , since keyboard hides the text area, and the enter button of the keyboard somehow does not trigger sending the message, and the "send" button in signal is hidden until you expend the editing area. But still very usable.
For now everything is messy, but I will try to make it available soon (I think it should be possible to do a click package, but I'm not sure yet)
Ps: Note that I could do it with Mobian version only for now.
Anyway after all the investigations that I've made I'm extremely confident that we'll be able to have a fully responsive client based on Signal-Desktop landed in the openstore within few month. I see exactly how to make it perfectly adapted to the phone Interface like whatsweb. (Funny enough it is possible to use a modified version of the js script of whatsweb to make the interface responsive, because the interface has an extremely similar structure. )
It's not anymore a question of "if" but a question of "when". But there are few tedious tasks in the way, and I need to go little by little, because I can't dedicate all my time to this.
Of course I'm open to any offer for help and testing!
Hi,
Today I just figured why not try:
sudo snap install signal-desktop
And I realize it just works! This is crazy. With this simple command I can link my device and see my chats. Well it is certainly not a responsive interface (but not terrible either, there's just the left menu coming in the way) and the keyboard does not show for now. But I can consult messages, and this is major.
It means:
1Β°) We can certainly create quite easily a version of Signal-Desktop that is adapted to mobile display (with few patches to the interface to make it responsive), and that we can get a full-fledge signal client on Ubtunu touch, that way.
2Β°) That Mir2.0 will certainly help with that.
Ps: I guess the first easy thing to make it usable as a consul-only stuff is adapt the scale, which I guess must be easily doable.
I've been able to recompile Signal-Desktop from source and apply my responsive script.
It is available in the Openstore alongside these other improvements:
-Fix startup from OpenStore
-Fix open url externaly
-Fix battery problem
-Fix double window problem
There still are some keyboard issues, it's probably the next thing I will work on.
First of, thank you so much for the development on Ubuntu Touch, it is becoming amazing!
I have a question about Wayland/Xmir apps (e.g uWolf, Signal-desktop, Snap apps) in the context of the upcoming Mir2.0
Will you consider implementing any of the following, to polish experience with Wayland apps:
Would you need/accept some help to do that?
Craziest thing:
The calls are partially working out of the box!!!!
Which means we can certainly get calls working one day!
Ok in this version of whatsweb I have the notifications working without being unconfined, and it gets to the system panel! (Provided the app is not suspended in background)
https://github.com/pparent76/whatsweb/tree/82cd0c659af09bfad4315ba6c39e398d881451c3
Hi,
Whatsweb has been upgraded to version 0.3.0 and later 0.3.2 . @alefnode has merged my work including some improvements listed bellow π₯³. The app should work correctly for all the main features. If you see something not working please do not hesitate report, as I'm working on it these days.
Improvements released in 0.3.0:
Improvements released in 0.3.2:
Currently being review in pull request:
Edit:
I'm building a new application for the openstore: Signal UT, which will be a custom version of signal-desktop for Ubuntu Touch. I've already succeeded to build an initial .click package of signal-desktop for Ubuntu Touch with basic tweaking to have a more acceptable scale and have the keyboard working. I've made scripts to build it automatically. Currently it is based on a reuse of the binaries from https://snapcraft.io/signal-desktop . But it does not require to use snap to work, it's a standalone click package (that we'll be able to publish openstore later).
https://github.com/pparent76/SignalUT
The app is currently not responsive (but I plan to work on it):
But it is already usable to consult messages, and send small messages (in a sub-optimal way)
What also works or kind of works:
WARNING: This is experimental, use at your own risks. The app currently needs to run unconfined. It contains binaries, that are free software but that I've not compiled personally (coming from snapcraft.io ) and that I have not checked. I do not take responsibility in case of any problem
Knowing that, if you want to be a tester, I'd be glad to get feedback from testers to know if it runs on other phones. So you will find a pre-built .click package here ( ONLY RUN ON NOBLE (24.04) ) :
https://github.com/pparent76/SignalUT/releases/tag/FirstRelease
Here would be my current starting script for wayland is there a way to do better to solve some of the problems?
@fredldotme @klh
#!/bin/sh
# Input method (probably does nothing as it is for X11 normaly)
export GTK_IM_MODULE=Maliit
export GTK_IM_MODULE_FILE=lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/gtk-3.0/3.0.0/immodules/immodules.cache
# Prefer Wayland
export GDK_BACKEND=wayland
export DISABLE_WAYLAND=0
export OZONE_PLATFORM=wayland
export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
export XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
export WAYLAND_DISPLAY=${WAYLAND_DISPLAY:-wayland-0}
export GTK_USE_PORTAL=1
export DCONF_PROFILE=/nonexistent
export XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/phablet/.config/signalut.pparent/
export PATH=$PWD/bin:$PATH
dpioptions="--high-dpi-support=1 --force-device-scale-factor=2.75"
gpuoptions="--use-gl=egl --enable-gpu-rasterization --enable-zero-copy --ignore-gpu-blocklist --enable-features=UseSkiaRenderer,VaapiVideoDecoder,ThreadedAnimation --disable-frame-rate-limit --disable-gpu-vsync --enable-oop-rasterization --enable-threaded-compositing"
sandboxoptions="--no-sandbox --disable-features=WaylandWindowDecorations "
waylandoptions="--ozone-platform=wayland --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform"
exec ./opt/Signal/Signal $dpioptions $gpuoptions $sandboxoptions $waylandoptions
The main thing for any hope of a usable option with wayland, would be to enable the keyboard for gtk over wayland. (And this I'm a bit afraid of the feasibility in Mir1.2). The other thing is to have a decent scaling factor while keeping the window of the right size, but if it is the only thing it can always be patched within Signal code, which is certainly not ideal but most probably doable.
Ok thank you!
But I don't know if chromium engine can make use of GPU for tasks that are not directly related to compositing? Because here it's an electron app with a chromium engine.
Just to make things clear I would like to switch to wayland if/when it is feasible. If someone has informations about how to run a GTK wayland app, with keyboard support, either with Mir1.2 or Mir2.0, please share as it would be extremely usefull!
For now, if I start with wayland: the window does not display correctly ( wrong scaling or wring size, as --force-device-scale-factor=2.75 make the window very big, it's like it zooms on it but does not reduce its size), it is more slugish than with X11, and it has no keyboard.
@wally said in GPS location does not work anymore in webview (Noble):
@pparent Is it just failing to give a location, or is it freezing or crashing?
There's a long topic about location-related freezes and crashes here, in case that's relevant to your situation. Seemed like a weird problem, or weird problems, to pin down. Different people had different reports.
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/8930/20-04-focal-unav-freezes-with-gps-enabled
It's freezing!
I will make a bug report. I think it is probably related to compass/orientation. Because in Pure Maps if I enable compass I have the same problem, but if I disable it, it works. And in my logs it reports "qtmir.sensor: PlatformScreen[0x558e3f63c0]::customEvent() - unknown orientation." when accessing to the position in the app.
But location should work in a webview even if somehow the compass does not work. (Which is strange because in my case compass apps do work.
Anyway I can tell that there will be significant performance improvement in next release!
@klh said in Signal UT: Signal-Desktop for Ubuntu Touch:
It's sluggish because you run it under Xorg - which is your choice, not a system limitation.
Please if you have a better way to do things, show us how to improve the app, I'm more that open to contributions and help, and it's clear that the app is 3 weeks old, and is currently not in it's optimal state, far from it, and it is supposed to evolve rapidly.
The only "choice" of my part, is trying to make it work, as soon as possible, and as good as possible, with the infos that I have at hand, and in that regard I just copied the way uWolf is working (And by the way the snap version of signal-desktop also starts with X11). In the code of uWolf ( that is the most famous port of a desktop app in the store and one of the only one), it says explicitly "# Explicitly force X11 backend for GTK applications like LibreWolf (will remove when mir2.x comes out)". Which led me to belive it's not possible to have a GTK app working properly with Wayland until the release of Mir2.x, and I did plan to switch to Wayland then, so I don't see why copy and paste would not work then. If you have any example of a GTK app working properly (including keyboard) in Wayland mode with Mir1.2, please share!
What I can say is that in my initial tests, if I run the app unconfined I can get it hardware accelerated even with X, so it seems the apparmor does prevents the app from accessing the GPU at least in an X11 context and without specific configuration. You can try it I do publish the unconfined version in github releases. So my statement is just a mere observation. Maybe if the app can be started with wayland the GPU would be accessible even in a confined context, but I still haven't found how to do it, despite my attempts.
Please if you have solutions to make it work better than it currently does, then show them to make things go forward! It's not helping to suggest that I make on purpose bad choices so that it does not work properly, while I'm spending a lot of my time contributing an app that somehow nobody has made until now, despite being an important need for many Ubuntu Touch users.
Ps: by the way I've also asked general questions about electron apps with Wayland In Ubuntu Touch, in the context of upcoming Mir2.0 realease, more than one month ago, before starting this app, without seemingly a consensus about what was possible or not, so I'm just experimenting. https://forums.ubports.com/topic/4507/electron-apps-on-ubuntu-touch/4
I also have a vollaphone 22 on Noble 24.04-1.0, but to me it is quite unclear if voLTE is supposed to be activated or not, because in the it just says "4G calls (VoLTE)" but without any switch and the area is not clickable, so I don't know if it is supposed to mean that it's on or off? And I have no real way to test it for sure, weather my calls are voLTE or normal.
The only thing is that few month ago I received messages from my operator to encourage me to activate voLTE, but this was before latest Ubuntu Touch upgrades.
I would like to know more.
@gpatel-fr said in Newbee trying hard, got a no space issue:
while your phone is a 'reference device', it don't have a lot of recent issues and that could mean that it's not widely used anymore.
This recent review was made with a google Pixel A3 it did not mention any issue with waydroid on Noble:
https://theprivacydad.com/using-ubuntu-touch-on-a-pixel-3a-phone/
@O.o. said in Installing Ubuntu Touch from a non-Android OS (specifically Sailfish):
Mainly I can't live without Signal
Have you seen that Signal-Desktop port is on the way? As of today, it still has some limitations, but it will definitely move progressively towards being a fully functional client in the coming months.
https://open-store.io/app/signalut.pparent
Notifications, Audio messages, and Upload/Download of pictures, will most probably make their way at some point, some of them in a not so distant future.
@Alain said in Can't open PDF files:
When I do "open", I see "File Manager", "MorpΔ₯ Browser", etc. I choose "File Manager" and I have to type the password. I tried to do "chmod 755 *" in the terminal (on /home/name) but File Manager still asks for my password.
You can first open the Filemanager, then chose a PDF and chose to view it with Chormium PDF or PDF.js. I very rarely start Chormium PDF or PDF.js directly from the application grid. This way you can also open a pdf directly from Morph Browser downloads, from dekko (e-mails), from Whatsweb, from Teleports, or whatever.
That being said, it is also possible to open first Chromium PDF or PDF.js, then open a PDF with filemanger, but it will display "Transfer in progress" as long as you did not actually select the pdf file in the filemanager window, and validate it with the check icon in the top right-hand corner. Note that it seems that if you already have the file-manager opened in background, it might not necessarily bring the window back in foreground in Noble (i Guess it's a small bug), but you can still go to it and select the file.
I've been able to recompile Signal-Desktop from source and apply my responsive script.
It is available in the Openstore alongside these other improvements:
-Fix startup from OpenStore
-Fix open url externaly
-Fix battery problem
-Fix double window problem
There still are some keyboard issues, it's probably the next thing I will work on.