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 :).

(

@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.

@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.

@fungie said in Miatoll devices UT Focal support:

So each time i do a clean install of ubuntu touch i have to flash (in this case) the stock firmware.

I doubt it. You can use the installer to reinstall UT with a wipe option to make it a clean install. If you go from a non Android 10-based system then yes, you need Android 10 firmware to be able to use UT because it is at least currently based on Halium 10 which expects Android 10 drivers ...

@jb-gbaeza There are a few issues with your suggestion.
a) There is no customer service as this project (lead by a foundation, not a company) doesn't sell any product other than perhaps some merch.
b) WhatsApp doesn't properly nor natively run on UT. There is already Telegram, this forum or e.g. even Mastodon where people can get in touch with the community to try to ask for help or share their ideas, exactly the way you do. So I think there is no reason to change that in any way.

Just FYI, the credit is not mine but goes to my brother - his nick is zub, mine is not :). Unfortunately I lack the deeper knowledge necessary for such things. All I did was that I upgraded it to work with clickable (already on the original repo) and to run on 16.04 (apparently the apparmor framework update is still not there, but whatever).

Regarding the SDL2 clickable template it doesn't sound as a bad idea though. However I really can't spend the time on it now :(. And the second thing is that SDL is no longer supporting Mir and new stuff may require newer SDL. So the question is whether this is useful. With Unity 8 and Mir upgrades (now on Edge) Wayland-enabled stuff should start working. So it would probably be better to start from scratch and take a look at how to compile SDL apps with Wayland. And I suspect that will be much more documented and a more streamlined experience.

Sadly Mir didn't turned out the way I was hoping it would ... it is a nicely written code on par with the latest standards as that's how Canonical rolls but that's probably not what the general Linux community wants :(.

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.

@clyder Awesome you have it working now. Btw, the Google contact sync is a known long standing UT issue, but not related to this device: https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/address-book-app/-/issues/201

@padraic Definitely not my work. Anyway, you can check GitLab to see who worked on this: https://gitlab.com/debclick/uFirefox

@arubislander That's a surprise. This is the first time I see that information. And I must say joyeuse is one of the best ports out there and is not lacking basically anything.

Contrary to what you say, any idea why OTA-5 has been released for it though?
https://system-image.ubports.com/20.04/arm64/android9plus/stable/miatoll

To verify the image from yesterday is indeed OTA-5 I just switched to that channel:
sudo system-image-cli -vvvv -p 0 --switch 20.04/arm64/android9plus/stable

@peat_psuwit Thank you so much. You just made my day brighter, as it scared me a lot. As much as I don't want to use Android there are occasions in which I can't choose and using Waydroid inside Ubuntu Touch for that is simply perfect.

Does Waydroid work for people? It has been broken on devel since March, so seems like the issues has propagated here now as well. The app appears to be running (Waydroid logo is visible in the taskbar), however no Android window appears on the screen.

Happens to me on Joyeuse, not sure if for others or elsewhere too. However, switching back to stable fortunately (I really need it for banking apps for instance) does recover this for me still.

@padraic Yes, builds are already in made by GitLab CI - on the link I shared. Download the archive for your architecture, extract, find a click package inside and install.

This one is probably more suited to be used on phones: https://gitlab.com/debclick/uFirefox/-/pipelines/1255486984
Either way this is a standard desktop app which is not well integrated into the system and also doesn't work properly unfortunately. Hopefully something that will improve with Mir updates, once UT/Lomiri is ready for those.

I haven't tried but wouldn't placing TextArea into Flickable work, making the TextArea the height of the max(main app window, its content) and making Flickable handle the scroll?

Albeit it is probably (and unfortunately) not going to automatically scroll down when inserting new lines in edit mode or just scrolling through with keyboard. Additional code to deal with that would be required, if at all possible

@randomusername I think any word for which the dictionary can't find more matches gets highlighted as such

As for the Google Keyboard, that doesn't seem related to UT at all, so why do you mix those two?

While I am in no way a security expert, how did you arrive to that conclusion? How is Android kernel related to OSK suggestions?

Don't worry too much about this, most of the time it's not a problem to run a tainted kernel; the information is mainly of interest once someone wants to investigate some problem ...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/admin-guide/tainted-kernels.rst

My Ubuntu desktop also returned a non 0 value for me when I just tried.

That surprises me though, because I think even the old SDL2 version that used to support Mir before that extension was dropped did contain Wayland support. Can the current Mir version we have actually work with Wayland or is it all XMir? I thought the later but maybe not in which case we could then probably use every SDL version there is.

This SDL2 working with XMir vs SDL3 running directly though Wayland is a bit confusing to me.