“Images and open source code for the Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu will be published on Thursday 21st February, supporting the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4 smartphones. They are intended for enthusiasts and developers, to familiarise themselves with Ubuntu’s smartphone experience and develop applications on spare handsets. Tools that manage the flashing of the phone will be available on the same day in the Ubuntu archives, making it easy to keep a device up to date with the latest version of the Touch Developer Preview.” Cool. Too bad it’s only for Nexus phones, and not for more popular ones.
What approach do they use to run X.org there?
They may not: <a href=”http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2013/02/canonical-working-on-new-display…
Even if they develop their own display server (very unlikely) it wouldn’t be ready in time for Ubuntu Phone. Most likely they have the regular xorg server.
I hope I am wrong, but I don’t expect to see any phones with Ubuntu phone preinstalled. I know about the October promise, but it’s probably going to be vapor, like the supposed Ubuntu TV devices.
Canonical doesn’t “get” hardware. Remember when Dell launched a couple of Ubuntu notebooks, and then Canonical released PulseAudio in the next upgrade and broke everything? Dell wasn’t amused. Or how about shipping new versions of X.org without testing them with the closed drivers first (say what you want about closed drivers, but if you want to use the full feature set of your graphics card, you need ’em). Canonical doesn’t care about the needs of hardware manufacturers (mainly: upgrades that don’t break everything every six months resulting in angry customers returning the hardware at the store), and hardware manufacturers don’t care about Ubuntu (Dell for example only sells one boutique XPS preloaded with Ubuntu nowadays, no mainstream models anymore).
And yet again, Canonical is going the nerdy way with Ubuntu phone, by telling you to “install it yourself” and that devices with Ubuntu preinsralled “are coming in the future”. The 1% that is brave and knowledgable enough to scrap the preinstalled OS will install Ubuntu phone, the 99% will simply not bother.
Wake me up when Canonical starts to care about the needs of hardware manufacturers.
Again, I hope I am wrong. I hate how iOS doesn’t support MicroSD so Apple can charge extortion prices for the 32GB versions, or how Android apps that are not developed with the NDK run inside an enulator that is not even JITed by the hardware (like Java is with Jazelle). But without hardware, Ubuntu phone is yet another “install it yourself” OS for the 1% of the nerd elite.
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; el-gr; LG-P990 Build/GRJ23) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 MMS/LG-Android-MMS-V1.0/1.2
Edited 2013-02-15 21:31 UTC
I’m not sure who would use the emulated Android device in the Android SDK, because it’s trivially easy to get the SDK’s “Run…” option to send the built apk to a real device (attached via USB in debugging mode) and run it immediately. I do it with my Nexus 7 and/or 10 when coding Android apps – it’s almost irresponsible of any devs not to do this, especially since it’s so easy.
Hence, how efficient the emulated Android device is really is an irrelevancy as far as most devs are concerned because I bet very few of them use it exclusively (who is going to develop any meaningful Android app and not have *any* real Android devices to test it on?).
Also note that the Nexus 10 is an ideal “reference Android device” because not only does it get the latest Android releases first, it can also adjust its screen resolution/density (via adb commands) to simulate the screens of “lesser” devices should you wish to test real hardware (GPS, accelerometer etc) with different screen attributes.
I’m not quite following your train of logic. Neither the Galaxy Nexus nor the new Google Nexus devices have a micro sd slot. Even if Ubuntu phones come out (which, like you, I also doubt) who’s to say they’ll have any micro sd slots in them? I hate this as much as you do but, in point of fact, it doesn’t matter one bit if the os supports micro sd if the devices aren’t coming equipped with sd hardware. It’s a damn shame to see Google following this trend, but they have done so and where the big guys go, a lot of little guys often follow.
Since ARM v7 Jazelle is deprecated and succeeded by ThumbEE (which is itself deprecated since 2011).
There’s no need of instruction sets like Jazelle on newer ARM architectures to accelerate Java bytecode since Dalvik can jit the code itself.
Interesting that you mention it should have been for more popular devices than the nexuses.
The nexus devices are the enthusiast devices, because they get all of the latest updates and don’t have bloatware like touchwiz installed.
I had thought that the nexus devices were the *most* popular devices amongst enthusiasts, meaning the most likely devices to be owned by anyone who would do any development or would be interested in flashing this image.
Well, the Nexus 4 is popular in the mainstream too.
Also, not all geeks light-heartedly flash their firmware to a foreign OS (that is not a Android OS). We are in nerd teritory. Someone with multiple cellphones (as for example a Galaxy Nexus and a Nexus 4) and not minding flashing the one to an OS that has very few apps and keeping it that way for more than 20 minutes. As i said, nerd teritory.
Canoninal must learn that the “install it yourself” trick (a trick to sidestep the lack of preinstalls and pretend manufacturers aren’t that important) doesn’t work in the 99% of people, and Canonical should start catering to the needs of hardware manufacturers. This is what keeps Linux from making it big in the desktop too. The “install it yourself”, and broken upgrades that annoy manufacturers and users.
Of course, I hope I am proven wrong and that we see Ubuntu phones in October.
Edited 2013-02-15 23:35 UTC
couldn’t agree more.
I’m interested in this myself, but will have to see if a dual boot is possible, because I actually need my phone to work.
I would be far more excited for a plasma active galaxy nexus image, though.
So long as a phone has dialers, web browsing and a text editor, it should be enough, so for KDE, I feel installing one’s own is just fine for now.
Edited 2013-02-15 23:35 UTC
You’re suggesting that Canonical should have released a phone to consumers with half finished software?
This is a developer preview…
On the telecommunication world developer previews come with hardware.
Why not? Every single thing Canonical has released within the past few years has been half-finished, and that’s being kind. 8.10 and onwards have been buggy, unfinished, unstable hodgepodges of software that don’t integrate well together at all.
Yay, now we can run the magnificent Xwindows server on our phones so we can ssh -X and use Xemacs remotely. How cool is that?
Who cares about usability and tons of apps from Google playstore?
I do that natively on my Nokia N900. It works great.
Isn’t it nice to have a portable device that conforms to standards?
Edit: I mean, I use “ssh -X” on my phone. I don’t use that EMACS crap. I use Vim.
Edited 2013-02-16 14:20 UTC
What specific standards are you talking about? Android is open and pretty portable since it runs on a couple of different ARM architectures, MIPS and x86.
I have seen people porting Android to N900 phones but no one ported Maemo over to Nexus or other Android devices.
And you can use Vim on android too: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.momodalo.app.vimto… .
That comment about ssh -X was a joke, who in their right mind wants a monster like Xwindows on a phone? They really should wait for Wayland. Even Gnome/Unity with gtk+ for framebuffer would be better.
The Nokia n9 is using xorg and it actually runs really well. Smooth and responsive. But I agree that Wayland is probably better for a phone.
N9 generally doesn’t really run well at all… http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml
(of course, that’s quite possibly not due to Xorg)
Edited 2013-02-22 18:24 UTC
X11 ran fine on computers in the 1980s. It runs fine on today’s phone hardware as well. That’s an actual verified empirical fact, not some hypothetical nonsense picked up from some message board.
Funny that, since it can’t really run most modern desktops with half-decent video cards for long. Guess it hasn’t kept up.
It can, and it does. Don’t be such an asshat.
Ah, personal insults. The signs of a true intellect.
It’s not a personal insult, it’s an encouragement to change your behaviour. A personal insult would be to say you have no choice but to be an asshat, but I truly believe you’re deliberately stupid and not born that way.
http://www.meegoexperts.com/2012/04/booting-nemo-galaxy-nexus-i9250…
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=MQGd3XvmtCs&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch…
Granted not Maemo/Meego but the successor Mer/Nemo. See also Plasma Active and JollaMobile ports.
It works fine, fast, stable on the N9 for example.
Till 2020? X11 ans fb already work today and yesterday. They can also reuse Android.
GTK+ is far from ready or usable on mobile. That’s why Clutter came but it got aborted by Intel. QML is it then. Works good with GNOME libs too as Canonical shows.
Edited 2013-02-17 03:04 UTC
As usual, your knowledge of Nokia and related is flawed – N9 itself hardly works fine or stable, overall http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml
Note: for “ssh -X” or “ssh -Y” to work, you only need the client libs and the application installed on the phone, and not Xorg itself (as in the drivers, display server, display manager, etc, etc).
The client-side install of Xorg is very small.
[rant]
Look, I’ve used an iPad since 1.0 (paid by work, not me), and IMHO apps are badly overrated. What I really want is a usable browser, but since Apple insists that all browser apps use their crashy renderer, I don’t have one.
What I do get is a browser where half of the websites endlessly insist that I install their “app” instead – where their app can’t zoom, requires that I scroll across horizontal multi-column pages instead of a nice clean vertical linear scroll, and don’t allow me to comment (or even read comments).
I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this – witness today’s XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1174/.
What I really want is a phablet with a great browser that websites think is a desktop, so they’ll freaking leave me alone and let me work / play / read / shop / whatever!
[/rant]
And yes, I know Apple != Android and I’m not a mainstream user, but the point remains.
Edited 2013-02-16 16:39 UTC
Can’t say I’ve seen the renderer crash. I’ve seen a lot of Safari crashes, but none of those have been in the Webkit renderer but have all been related specifically to Safari and it’s awful user interface.
Presuming you don’t have to deal with Flash, using a browser that allows you to change your user-agent should take care of most of that. Chrome and Atomic both allow you to do this, though Atomic’s is much more customizable and permanent. Safari will allow this as well, but you must manually enter your user-agent header rather than being able to switch it on the fly from a list, and no amount of user-agent switching will take care of Safari’s god awful interface.
Flash isn’t permitted on iPads, but I am using the Chrome browser on it. And it does crash several times a day, just like Safari and Mercury (which is why I presume it’s the common render engine).
iPad’s Chrome has no entry in the system Settings app, and I see no option to set the user agent in the in-browser settings. But while exhaustively running the menus looking for the user agent setting (pointer appreciated if you have one), I found an entry called “Request Desktop Site”. Tested it on ExtremeTech (one of the mobile sites I dislike), and it switched to the desktop site for that and all subsequent internal links during the session. Much better!
So… Thanks! Got any suggestions for the crash problem?
That’s the extent of Chrome’s user-agent switching: it can appear as desktop Chrome for that session. Looks like you found it.
It’s not as customizable as some of the other browsers on iOS but it will at least get you past most mobile sites. There’s no way to make it permanent, however.
Can you point me at some web pages that cause it? I’ve seen Safari crash but I’ve not seen Webkit do the same. I’ve got quite a few browsers on here (tried them all before I settled on Atomic as my primary choice) so I can try to make them crash if you’ve got a way to reproduce it. Also, which iOS version are you running?
It’s random rather than on specific websites, unfortunately. It does happen when loading or reloading a website (and I use most of Google’s infrastructure, for instance), but since the engine forces a reload every time I switch tabs (an annoyance I didn’t mention earlier), it has plenty of opportunities.
5.1.1 (9B206) – I can’t move to 6, since I still have the original iPad (did I mention my 3G is free? ;-).
Again, much appreciation for the advice.
Nice on the free 3g. I’ve moved to 6 on all my devices though, so perhaps that’s why I haven’t seen it. I don’t recall seeing it with 5.1.1 either but, if it’s that random, that’s not entirely surprising.
The only time I wanted to install a “classic” linux distro on my phone was more than 1 year ago when I wanted to use aircrack-ng but most wifi drivers on android phones couldn’t be put in monitor mode. Since then, drivers were patched and I can happily use aircrack and reaver to wrestle with wifi networks.
There’s tons of useful apps in the playstore which enable you to have a good phone or tablet experience. Many of them are better than any desktop Linux counterpart. I can’t see any incentive right now to install Ubuntu on a phone apart from a nerd impulse.
Agreed. Considering how much better many of the apps are, perhaps Canonical should be thinking of a way to integrate a full Android layer into Ubuntu. I think it’s pretty clear that, despite the continuing cries of fans, desktop Linux will never have anywhere close to the quality of app development that Android and iOS enjoy. Perhaps a full Dalvik/Android compatibility layer could bridge that gap, although you’d then have the same problem as Windows 8 has (i.e. the user interface would be all wrong for desktops or laptops).
You mean like Blackberry did in Playbook? That would be a smart idea, and it would have some attractiveness to be able to run all Android apps and as an added bonus be able to run regular desktop Linux apps.
That’s exactly what I mean although, at least in the case of the Playbook, the user interface wouldn’t be a problem the way it would on a typical pc. Do the emulation correctly on a tablet and it could be seemless indeed, but try the same with a keyboard and mouse… Well, I think that would very much resemble what we’ve seen another operating system try with less than satisfactory results.
With two days to go:
* So far there is a preview SDK.
* No Emulator.
* No mention of any manufacturers on board.
* The SDK appears to be C++ / HTML + JS (Correct me if I am wrong). Which is an odd choice.
Unless they get these things are present on Thursday, they won’t really have a lot of lot of traction in the market or with developers that aren’t ubuntu die hards.
Also for me there is no compelling reason to go for this platform, it is neither familiar (I have Java/C# experience) or popular.
Edited 2013-02-18 20:46 UTC
So a linux kernel with unique gui? Sounds like Android. What the point? Why not just run Android?