Hello and welcome to your newsletter.
Websites
The latest updates to our websites have now been released. We are very excited about the redesign across our sites and making things easier to find and clearer to read and understand. Thanks to everyone involved, they are in no particular order Kaizen, Lga, Kingu, Flohack and Capsia
voLTE on FairPhone 5
Many of you will no doubt have noticed that Marius has put out a post on our Forum asking for help testing voLTE on the Qualcomm based FairPhone 5 https://forums.ubports.com/topic/10484/qualcomm-volte-call-for-testing/23The forum thread not only covers the FairPhone 5 but there are also discussions on other Qualcomm devices too. All very interesting and well worth a look.
There are a couple of bugs affecting both Qualcomm and Mediatek devices at present but there is a chance voLTE could still land in Focal.
UTC 2 The Hague and Ubuntu Summit
A few notes from Paul Hortola (AppsLee)
A few weeks ago just before the Ubuntu Summit in the Hague we held the second Ubports Touch Down. Also in the Hague the UTD bought together UBports and Ubuntu Touch developers, contributors and community members.
First order of business, the UTD.
Sadly Marius who was expected to attend couldn't make it due to an on going health issue.
Thankfully, Mairus could join remotely for the first day which was well received by the people in the room.
There where many discussions and hacking during the UTD. Some of the discussions evolved coming up with the date for a pre-release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04.
Based on Marius' input and feedback from Ratchanan the release is set for a Christmas or the very latest a New Year release. This will be a testing release of the current status of development at that time and hopefully generates attention on fixing issues before a full release with a hard milestone set to April 2025.
To achieve this goal, we have to freeze the code end of November to assess the current state before communicating about the skills required to go further.
Another area of focus was the need to drive developers into working in the best interest for users that daily drive Ubuntu Touch, Raoul proposed that the dev sync should evolve to be more efficient and focus on areas that have a major impact on the daily user first and the more esoteric areas after that. Once identified people can then volunteer to tackle an important bug or feature for the users.
Ubuntu Summit
It was a nice event with a lot of communities with whom I can see some collaboration happening in future.
People from KDE are planning an event on sustainability and keeping old devices alive when big tech are cornering the user to renew their hardware.
A company is creating devices based on RISC-V with fully open source hardware and drivers.
I met someone from Igalia who's working on a brand new browser engine who told me that Igalia has expertise with the major webengines and have the resources to help us out with a better solution for Morph.
Canonical is pushing a private 5G network that could be interesting for companies with a large campus to stay productive.
KDE again has been adapted as a snap on top of Ubuntu Core, maybe we can do similar thing with Lomiri to help us in the maintenance of Ubuntu Touch in the long run...
I also talked with Erik from OS.SCi who's working on a student program that will benefit Ubuntu Touch.
Those events are really important for the community.
It was a great time to meet people within the UBports community and people outside that align with our values.
Thanks to our sponsor that made it all possible and thanks to all the people who could make it there
Paul Hortola
Brax3
You may have noticed an indigogo campaign for the Brax3 and then the exciting part, that it will also support Ubuntu Touch. Well, we are in the process of finalizing details with the designers and manufactures of the Brax3
for on going support and updates so full details are not yet available.
However we can say that the port is being developed by their in house developers and at this stage it will only be available for installing by the end user using the installer. We would want this situation to change so that in the future the phone will become available with UT pre installed during 2025.
This is a great opportunity for both UBports, Ubuntu Touch and the device manufacturers with a device with great specs at a price point that is more accesible than many.
The devices are designed and partially manufactured in Europe by LUNR and should be available after a succesfull indigogo end of March 2025. Full details and current status can be found here.OTA-7 Out of schedule security issue fix
We're going to release Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-7 earlier than schedule to fix a number of security issues affecting Pulseaudio, our audio server. One of the issue affects privacy of Ubuntu Touch users, and thus we've decided to release an out-of-schedule update.
The issues are as follow:
- Confined applications can remove the Trust Store permission system module from Pulseaudio, allowing such applications to access the phone's microphone without user knowing, amongst a number of privileged actions.
- Confined applications are able to crash Pulseaudio by performing a volume control on a specific virtual device when a Bluetooth headset is connected.
Both of the issues are specific to the way Ubuntu Touch patches and uses Pulseaudio. However, the second issue has a potential to affect some Ubuntu 16.04 installations running non-default configuration (newer versions are not affected). As such, we've coordinated with Canonical on the timing before making this announcement.
Due to the way our release pipeline works, Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-7 will also contain a number of fixes which are not related to the aforementioned issues. Thus, we'll release an RC for 20.04 OTA-7 in upcoming days and we'll announce a call-for-testing. We plan to release Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-7 on Friday 29 November 2024.
Updated: Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-7 RC is out, which should have version 2024-W47. Please take some time to switch your spare/development phone to the 20.04 RC channel and test this OTA.
Thanks to Ratchanan for the above. Please check the
forum thread for the latest updates.
