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.
