Hello,
the feature was removed from the default installation but you can still get them working on any Ubuntu touch device.

So here is what you need to do:

1. Install "Desktop Apps Scope" so that you can browse your legacy (X11) apps and execute them.
   https://uappexplorer.com/app/libertine-scope.ubuntu

2. Now you should connect your phone to your computer as this is easier done on desktop rather than on the device itself. However, if you set your phone terminal not to suspend itself or you will supervise it all the time it is also possible to do this on your device.
   If you are going the desktop computer way you need to enable developer mode on your device (so have some kind of a pin or password set on your phone - it should tell you when enabling the developer mode). Then you need to execute "phablet-shell" or "adb shell" (without the quotes) on your PC.
   If you are doing this directly on your device, just open the terminal app (must be installed).

3. Either way you are now in your Ubuntu device shell. So execute this in order to create an Ubuntu container to hold your apps: libertine-container-manager create --id ubuntu --name 'ubuntu'
   Change the name and ID if you'd like.
   This is a lengthy process and will take some time on the device (about 10 minutes).

4. Now you have the container set up. In order to maintain it you can execute something like this:
   libertine-container-manager exec --command "/bin/bash" --id ubuntu
   Once executed you'll have the superuser shell of the inside container and you can do "apt install firefox" or whatever you want, just like on the desktop.
   You can also install apps like this: "libertine-container-manager install-package -p firefox -i ubuntu"

Once app or apps are installed just go to the scope installed in the first step (you must enable it by swiping from the bottom edge on the main screen). If it was already enabled refreshing the view may be necessary.

For more info about what you can do with the Ubuntu container see "libertine-container-manager --help".

Some of you may find these demos usable:
https://gitlab.com/zub2/SDLDemo
https://gitlab.com/zub2/MirGLESDemo

However with the Mir upgrade things should become a bit easier as regular Wayland-compiled SDL stuff should start working there. That is if I understand it correctly.

Hi,
since Anbox is finally here and usable more than ever before, who wouldn't want to play with it.

Unfortunately only the most powered devices were selected for this right now - leaving MX4 behind. But thanks to Marius arale is now in too :).

So, either build it on your own or download a boot image for arale here:
https://gitlab.com/zubozrout/kernel_arale (kernel patched with anbox stuff)
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-canonical.img
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-ubports-old.img
https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/arale-boot-anbox-ubports-latest.img (I'd recommend this one as it has the latest initrd.img)

Then continue by installing the above images just as mentioned here:
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1676/development-testers-for-anbox

If the image is flashed and your system booted up you should be able to check anbox binder is available eg. like this:

phablet@ubuntu-phablet:~$ file /dev/anbox-binder
/dev/anbox-binder: character special (511/0)

Installing Anbox may become a bit tricky since we have little space to operate with - so remount your / partition rw as mentioned in the original post, update and upgrade via apt, create some folder in your home, called e.g. "anbox" and do this:
apt -o Dir::Cache::Archives=/home/phablet/anbox install anbox-ubuntu-touch

Now we are almost there. You can now delete that new folder in home with all its content.

However in order for the last step: anbox-tool install to work you'll need to do this:

sudo nano /usr/bin/anbox-tool

and edit this line (it is one of the first lines of code, bellow the license comment):
DEVICES_URL = "https://iubuntu.cz/mx4/devices.json" (not leaving anything after it - on this line)

No we have swapped the json file which it checks against with our own containing arale in the list.

Now just do the mentioned anbox-tool install - it will take a while. And you are good to go :).

Enjoy

PS. Thank you very much Marius for your precious time and very valuable help with this :).

(

@flohack You are of course right, but it is not just that. Look at the other side of the coin - Microsoft hurt Linux a lot in the past. Among well known examples I could even share a local example: In 2000 Microsoft almost destroyed a computer selling company named Mironet because they preferred Linux. They had their computers confiscated for almost 2 years based on Microsoft telling police they have illegal software on their PCs - which turned out not to be true. Before this all happened they were the biggest computer selling company in the Czech republic and because of this other company (Alza) took their place instead (czech source). And not much has changed now with things like this.

In any case I don't intend to spam here. Just wanted to say I don't trust Microsoft - but maybe they are better now than in the past. And I understand that GitHub had issues and had to act. Regarding myself I wasn't sure whether I should move my own projects over to GitLab or stay until I read this thread's first post. But it is of course much easier to move a few projects of mine not relying on anything than such a complex infrastructure UBports has. And therefore I agree with you the move should note be based solely on the fact Microsoft has taken over the service as it works well for the project now and would require quite a lot of resources to proceed with the move.

Who knows what Microsoft plans for GitHub. But it surely will no longer be what it used to be as so many people moved away in the last day or so. And I must say I miss the nice, simple and straightforward interface on GitLab.

@joe Well there are still apps you can't install from the Open Store like Extremetuxracer or Neverball/Neverputt. Someone should upload those to the Open Store and then it can go away :). Anyway, I believe that removing the icon would not hurt - people would still be able to enable the store scope and swipe to it if enabled.

@jezek Well, you would need to find the partition table of you phone to find the correct partition to flash the image to.

Not sure what would happen if the boot logo image was incorrect, it would work nonetheless (with a black screen) or perhaps it would brick the phone and you would have to reflash the correct image using fastboot then ... something like fastboot flash logo splash.img (the command may not work at all or could be different depending on the device).

And if you flash it to a wrong partition there is a great chance of bricking the phone.

@Stefano Hm, this doesn't make sense then. If it works with Android sending to manufacturer is certainly not an option here. If that's the case then it would mean the EFS doesn't get destroyed but rather Ubuntu Touch has issues reading it.

@UniSuperBox Would there be a way for users to debug this somehow? It would be great if this thing could be solved as it seems to be recurring quite often in the forums/on github.

Hi,
you can always Google man pages for specific things when on the go, even narrow it down by distro and its version when searching.

But it doesn't make much sense to have them installed on phones. It would just occupy precious space while being very rarely useful - especially when there are other sources available.

Ok, so there is this ppa https://launchpad.net/~bhdouglass/+archive/ubuntu/clickable with the latest forked package that is even available for bionic :). And it has xenial app support. With that reviewing the packages should work correctly.

Hello,
I've been trying to migrate an app previously created for vivid over to xenial and it seems to be bumping into the following issue:
** (process:5611): WARNING **: Unable to start app 'transport.zubozrout_Transport_1.1': Invalid app ID: transport.zubozrout_Transport_1.1

That is everything builds fine, the predecessor of this app even works fine, but for some reason I can't launch this app. If I build it with 15.04 it launches fine on xenial but doesn't work as it should afterwards.

So my question is, how is the app ID string generated so that I can change it to a valid string. And what is the issue? Is it the uppercase T, numbers or the dot?

(I am using clickable on 18.04 tu build my old Ubuntu SDK project)

Appreciate all your help.

@keneda I would suggest trying the search function this forum has
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/1679/how-to-anbox-for-meizu-mx4-arale

However not sure if it still works. AFAIK there was not really much Ubuntu Touch Anbox-related development going on in the last few years.

Either SSH, but that could be problematic with WiFi not working when the phone goes to sleep + also more difficult SSH setup than on other devices (and please let me know if there is a working way to enable SSH automatically after reboot).

Or boot into "recovery" while holding the volume up + power button and connect your Pinephone to your computer via USB. You will then be able to mount all the filesystems on the device with the last (most probably 10th) partition being userdata which is the one you are most probably interested in. That way you can transfer music, documents, etc. Not the most user friendly or quick way I must admit, but certainly the fastest one as SSH is not as performant for me with Pinephone (on those occasions I am lucky to be connected to WiFi) as for instance with Meizu MX4.

@w0lf3n This is really weird. Maybe some issue with the phone hardware itself then :(.

I always had to use the old command line method: https://github.com/ubports/wiki.ubports.com/blob/master/How-to-install-Ubuntu-Touch-16.04.md

Has this been fixed already: https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/issues?page=1&q=mx4
I mean the numerous Fastboot errors? Never worked for me because the device can't reboot itself to recovery from Fastboot - user has to do that manually and the installer breaks not expecting that :(. But I haven't tried that recently so maybe that's fixed now - but was not for a long while.

With PinePhone having the ability to run Wayland apps, how is the work on bringing this support to Android based devices and which ones are not going to make it? Having Wayland compatibility everywhere would (I expect) allow developers to bring over a lot of opensource games as so far there only were a few (ExtremeTuxRacer, Neverball, Neverputt) but these are no longer available.

Well, I hope that when they do it these modifications will get upstream. It would be great if this was somewhat configurable. And I think that dealing with only a situation where the notch is at the top of the screen would very much suffice.

So based on some config (notch position + dimensions, maybe even shape + top corner radius) the top bar would adjust to not display anything in these problematic areas and would resize so that apps do not get hidden behind it either.

After all Unity 8/Lomiri is just a nice but large QML project so I suppose even JavaScript could handle this but of course better and faster in performance to do it inside the C++ bit.

@w0lf3n The cable could be at fault here too. Based on your comments this is completely unrelated to the UBports installer but you'd find the same problems trying to install any Android ROM too.

So, the questions are:

• Can you use the cable simply to transfer files to/from a phone? Does it work and does the transfer succeed?
• Can you try a different USB cable? Some have issues with this - usually the longer cable the worse it can get.

@pixelated If you mean windows / active window should resize when keyboard is visible so they do not occupy the space below it and if scrollable/flickable its content should scroll to the active input element then this has never been implemented in the windowed mode afaik, not even in the old Unity 8. This mode is not really useful for touch screen only operation but is dedicated for use when a keyboard is attached.

I also don't think Android for instance behaves much better:
https://youtu.be/jGOOhlvrCyg?t=50
https://youtu.be/x41VtXSbp_I?t=119
though I could be in error as I have not tried it myself nor was I able to find any better resources than these two videos. You can nonetheless find a lot of images of this mode enabled with keyboard attached as one would expect.

This looks great @Kaizen and I totally agree that the homepage should attract. Your design is something fresh, different to what UBports has atm. I also agree with what @CiberSheep is saying and hope that this will end up in something gorgeous :).

@dtarrant "BTW I noticed that the bottom of the forum menu is partially off the screen."
If you bump into any such issues it would be ideal if you could try to browse for them here: https://github.com/ubports/ubuntu-touch/issues (in case such report exists already)
and if found add your comment to that issue with any further information that may be helpful.

If you can't find such issue reported already then open up a new ticket, giving as much description as possible, adding your device info, channel + release in which the error occurs (or say any if it is not specific to a single release) and ideally attach a screenshot/photo. Only then these kind of issues can be addressed (if possible and easy to fix) as these are listed at a single specific place and forum is not the best place to report anything. Maybe asking others if they have the same issue - for that, this is a good place I'd guess.

But to be honest if this is a device-specific issue the fix will probably not come from the main development team but someone from the community would have to fix it. Though as mentioned, there is a higher chance of getting some traction on GitHub rather than here.