Ubuntu Touch Audiocast

UBports Q&A 123 by UBports

UBports Q&A 122 by UBports

Yt5scom - Ubuntu - Touch - Qa - 121 - 128 - Kbps by UBports

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 120 by UBports

Ubuntu Touch Q&A 119 by UBports

Starting with what is happening with the existing 16.04 based version of UT, Alfred was very pleased to announce the first port of Halium for a device which achieves 100% feature coverage! The device is of course the Pixel 3a, which Alfred has been working on for a long time. Since device development is continuous, this covers a greater number of features than were present when Canonical presented UT phones with a full feature set. The device initialisation is much improved on previous devices. It uses UDEV in Java keyboard. It is using only one partition and does not run an initramfs like other devices.

There are no audio issues now when the device goes into sleep mode, so you can listen to music in the background without it cutting out.

The final thing which brought the device to completeness was the implementation of aethercast. That is the system which allows wireless external display support. It is compatible with Miracast, the Microsoft version. At present it only operates at 720p. Next on the list with be 1080p capability, along with 60 fps.

If you look at Twitter, you can see that Arubislander and others have been testing out the casting capability of the Pixel 3a, with their own equipment.

Lomiri has received some attention. There was an issue with the drawer hiding away under the mouse counter and that has been fixed.

Another fix deals with stretched push indicator icons when in desktop mode.

An issue with rpowered which prevented maintenance of the wake mode when programs had made a call on the system has also been resolved. Devices which have seen problems with suspend when dealing with tasks should see an improvement.

Our Devices page has ‘wireless external monitor’ listed as a category but for most devices that shows as a No. Now we have a yes. It is an awesome feature. You can use it to switch to your desktop mode on a large screen. Most devices supported by UT don’t have an HDMI out or equivalent, so wireless is the only option. Scale is not an issue so it will work with a big screen, for example to show slides in a lecture. We have quite a long way to go with providing business oriented functions on UT devices and this is a very important step on that road. Not having to carry a laptop to a meeting room would be great!

The aethercast option is contained within the UT build but is not on by default and for each device, the porter needs to fine tune the implementation before it can be used at all.

There are strange chips in some devices which are unable to support P2P mode and will therefore never be able to support aethercast.

Device porters should contact (best via the porting group) to find out what they need to do in order to enable aethercast on their devices.

The Lenovo tablet is another device that porters have been able to test aethercast on.

There has been a very long pause during which we didn’t have any installer updates and the most recent releases were to some extent broken, so we had to recommend older versions. At last, we have a brand new installer update. Big thanks to the UBports installer team for putting it together. Special thanks to Johanna (Neothethird) for their major input to installer development. The latest iteration is 0.9.3.

If you use the new version, be aware that there may still be some device specific bugs. Generic bugs are not expected but of course feedback from use is very important and we look forward to hearing reports of how it works for you. It includes a fix to the OpenCuts QA tracking upload facility, which will aid your feedback.

Three new devices have been added to the installer. The first of these is the Lenovo tablet M10 X605. This is an affordable device with moderate but sufficient power.

The next is another tablet, the Jingpad A1. This is a Halium 10 based device. A special feature of this tablet is that a companion keyboard attaches magnetically and when it does, the display switches to desktop mode. It therefor functions very nicely as a convergent device! The bad news is that Jing seem to be having issues and it appears that the device is no longer available through the normal retail channel. If you can find one ‘remaindered’ it would be well worth buying. Otherwise it may not be possible to get one. Maybe another business will come up with something similar that works great with Linux. Alfred has created a VScode setup, to make this a true ‘programming on the go’ option. It is capable of Git pushes, installing Git in Libertine and launching a wrapper on the host side.

Florian has been helping out a bit with the work to port the Shift 6MQ. That too is now in the installer. It is Halium 10 based. Alex from Shift Phones did most of the work on it, so huge thanks to him. Of course without the input of Nikita on Halium 10 we would not have got to this point. At present it only has a devel channel. We need do do some more testing and development before we can present a Stable option. A known issue is audio on incoming calls, which fails 80% of the time. When it does work, it is crystal clear though. It has USB-C display out, so you can attach a DisplayPort compatible monitor.

There has been a very long pause during which we didn’t have any installer updates and the most recent releases were to some extent broken, so we had to recommend older versions. At last, we have a brand new installer update. Big thanks to the UBports installer team for putting it together. Special thanks to Johanna (Neothethird) for their major input to installer development. The latest iteration is 0.9.3.

If you use the new version, be aware that there may still be some device specific bugs. Generic bugs are not expected but of course feedback from use is very important and we look forward to hearing reports of how it works for you. It includes a fix to the OpenCuts QA tracking upload facility, which will aid your feedback.

Three new devices have been added to the installer. The first of these is the Lenovo tablet M10 X605. This is an affordable device with moderate but sufficient power.

A big improvement has just been announced, with the release of Clickable 7.0. This is the software which UT uses to build apps and this version has new features across the board. There is a Clickable tool which will handle the format and library changes for those on the older version. It has way more options than any developer is likely to need and overall has more features than Xcode. It makes the whole process of creating apps for UT easy and seamless.

Work on Xenial has not stopped. Rotating lock screen now works. Thanks to Capsia for that change. Some ports now have background blur. A wallpaper behind the UI was a very simple arrangement and posed no risk to stability. Making things more fancy has the potential to introduce bugs and degrade performance but we have brought in a modification which works well. Porters have the final say but if they want, they can implement a translucency layer, so that when the app drawer is expanded from the left side, the wallpaper is visible in blurred form behind it. This feature will be in the next OTA release. Something similar was tried a long time ago and was tested on the Nexus 5. The performance was dreadful, so it is good to see that the problems have been solved.

Dialer has had an improvement. There is now a predictive feature which will offer a suggestion based on your first few numbers punched in.

WebGL in Morph is going to be in the next OTA release. Some of the very old devices such as BQ will unfortunately not be able to make use of it.

An improvement which you might not have noticed is that when swiping away tabs in Morph, the action is now more fluid.

Alfred has been continuing his refinement of the Pixel 3a. Landscape keyboard now works and there is an improvement in battery life. A really big one is the fact that you can at last fix in-call voice volume. That was a fundamental usability issue. “It will no longer blow Mark Shuttleworth’s ears – only his mind” :)

OTA-22 was delayed by a bit. There was a synchronisation fault which, unusually, affected the rc channel too. Apps started to break so we delayed and reverted. It will be sorted out soon and procedures changed around a bit to avoid future problems.

Ubuntu Touch Q&A Episode 115 by UBports

Let's bring back the touch

By Joe (In here)

I've come so far

I dreamed a dream

and this is it.

Like a shooting star

Going up the stream

I must commit

I'm feeling so numbered

I 'm installing on many more

devices

All your comforts

Without them preying on

your vices

I've been sorting request

more than a thousand new

Yes, I've been porting it's best

When it's with U.

----

I'm on the course

I'm in too deep

I don't know how

My brain is open source

I never sleep

I can't stop now

I imagine a phone that

does everything you would

expect

Safe in your home

and treats all the humans with

Respect

I've been sorting request

more than a thousand new

Yes, I've been porting it's best

When it's with U.

Is there somebody out there

I think I'm coding alone tonight

It's more than software.

But it's getting really hard to continue the fight.

It could be me and you and more we could do so much

2021 is done. I see 20.04

Let's bring back the touch