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Announcing Ubuntu and Android dual boot developer preview

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146 pointsplatz73 comments

Ah, I wish I could port VLC for Ubuntu Phone safely...

But after numerous questions, several mails and IRL contact at tradeshows and conference, I still don't know if I can access the audio output (Pulse) and the video output (either Xv or an OpenGL context).

Their developer website is about HTML5, QML and HTML5 Platform access. If you look closely, you get libcanberra or gstreamer options... But I need lower access... How do I do that?

When I checked last time, you could ssh to the device and basically use apt-get like on any debian like system.

Not sure if anything is planned to be implemented to actually launch commands, but some people have already found a way to do it using C++ plugins [1].

The last thing to check would be if vlc is able to use the hardware :)

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/288494/run-system-commands-fr...

Of course, but that does not guarantee that the requested library/API will be present on the final phone or that you will be allowed to go on the market.

So, if we cannot access (or are forbidden access to) alsa/pulse, OpenGL or OMX, in the final device, this would be just useless work...

Woops, sorry, didn't realize you actually were a vlc developer. I read that like you just wanted to run it on your own device.

Don't worry, my post was not that clear. I am one of the main VLC dev and I've been porting or helping to port on most mobile OSes...

VLC doesn't even seem to be fully ported to Android yet.

First, that's not true: almost all features are ported.

Then, Android is quite much more far from a Linux desktop stack than an Ubuntu phone. It notably has a different (very broken) libc, pthread implementation and different audio output stack...

Well, it is true...if "almost all" the feature but not all of them are ported, then its not "fully ported".

You want DVD and Blu-Ray playback on Android? Or external cameras?

Porting and shipping all features in the default build are 2 very different things...

I'm not saying it makes sense, but the GP is correct that its not a full port. Also, there are android devices that can take both CD/DVD and eternal cameras, so it isn't too far fetched

Sorry, but we'll have to agree to disagree here. It's like saying the version on Windows is not a full port because there are some plugins missing compared to the Linux version. And vice-versa.

Very little features not possible (mostly because of the OS) can hardly be considered as "not fully ported" as meant by salient.

I've been using the beta[1], it works pretty well. If you live in the US you'll have to grab an apk elsewhere[2].

1: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.videolan.v...

2: http://nightlies.videolan.org/build/

I ported MOAI to Ubuntu phone in about an hour. (http://getmoai.com) Underneath the hype, its still a Linux workstation .. so you have access to all the things you need. Access to GL context is available ..

OK. But are you guaranteed that you will get access to GL and Alsa (or pulse) in the released phones?

As guaranteed as any other OS. I am, after all, linking against the built-in libs, which presumably are not there for any reason other than to be linked with ..

I disagree, on iOS and Android, you pretty know what libs will be in the default installation, because it is documented.

But your experience conforts me, I'll work on it soon :)

While native platform access is not officially documented yet, low-level platform access is provided via the platform API (see launchpad.net/platform-api). With the platform API, you are able to easily bootstrap an EGL/GLES2 context, setup input handling, access sensors and location services etc.. As mentioned before, we do not have a complete set of documentation available, yet, but our Qt platform abstraction implementation might be helpful in getting started. EGL context bootstrapping is done in:

  * http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/view/head:/src/platforms/base/screen.cc
  * http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/view/head:/src/platforms/base/context.cc
  * http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/view/head:/src/platforms/base/integration.cc

Surface creation is done here:

  * http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/view/head:/src/platforms/base/window.cc

Input handling and callback setup:

  * http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/qtubuntu/trunk/view/head:/src/platforms/ubuntu/ubuntucommon/window.cc

A very simple example can be found here:

  http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~phablet-team/platform-api/trunk/view/head:/src/ubuntu/hybris/tests/test_c_api.cpp#L90

Hope that helps. If not, feel free to jump over to #ubuntu-touch on freenode. My nick is tvoss.

I will join the channel and'll contact you...

As a 7 years Ubuntu user, recent releases has been a turn down for me (Desktop releases are letting me down, servers are keeping their quality so far).

The decisions, choices and the fact I need to work hard to tweak the system to get it into a sane level of satisfaction is disappointing.

Hence, when Canonical announces devices releases, I wonder if it is not more of the same?

I still don't have a desktop replacement, but would be happy to find one and try it on.

What happened to do one thing well principle?

Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx. And it seems lie since the unity fork, we are just going far off-the-track - and OSx wins.

Disagree. I prefer Unity to both OSX's DE and any other Linux DE (though Gnome shell is up there too). Also, seems Linux is more mainstream than ever - I see it popping up everywhere...

Unity's dock is one of the most pathetic UI failures I've seen recently, and they don't seem to be wanting to fix that, because they're intent on having a desktop experience that is inferior to Windows 8, much less OS X. Desktops are not tablets are not phones. They each deserve to have GUIs that fit their strengths.

> Desktops are not tablets are not phones. They each deserve to have GUIs that fit their strengths.

So what tablet features are there? A plethora of keyboard shortcuts? How about the search-able Dash and HUD, both accessed with a few key strokes?

Dunno about you, but these are huge wins on the desktop for me.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/668415/comments/336

Having a dash and a HUD have absolutely NOTHING to do with being able to place a dock where you need it. Maybe you don't have good spacial memory, or maybe I don't have adequate keyboard-app-launching-magical-fingers, but I seriously doubt that people are getting any more work done than I do with a dock on the bottom of the screen.

Then use Docky or Cairo dock. I personally don't know why having it to one side is a problem, I don't have a problem adapting to UI changes. A dock on the left or bottom is hardly worth thinking about.

I fully agree with you. Unity's dock is really what makes me hate unity. For me, gnome is the best desktop, but my problem is that I want to have a mainstream distribution to avoid having to debug my linux installation. ubuntu-gnome seems to have problems (https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-gnome/2013-December...) and fedora seems to have also some problems.

You know that there is something more efficient than the mouse, like the HUD or keyboard shortcuts?

Yeah, because when discussing a failure of a UI feature, the solution is keyboard shortcuts. Why even have a window manager or desktop environment? Why even have a keyboard? Clearly the most metal thing to do is to take two wires and communicate with the computer in binary by touching the ends together.

You said you want a desktop UI that fits a desktop computer's strengths, right?

Well, one of the strengths of a desktop computer is its (very efficient) keyboard. So why would you want an UI that pretends the only input device that matters is the mouse?

I actually like Unity. The flashy effects are tasteful. When doing an Alt-Tab window switch, you can finally select the window you want with your mouse (something that was missing and was annoying me). You can also easily switch between windows created by the same application, which is really useful when you get used to it (works by either keyboard shortcut or a mouse click on the app's icon in the Launcher). The app menu is always displayed at the top, mixed with the notifications bar. When maximizing a window, the window's title bar goes away, which is useful on these 16:9 format screens (vertical space is more precious than horizontal space). All the apps I care about are displayed in the Launcher. For everything else, I can open the Dash and do a search. The Launcher is on the left, which is OK-ish for me, as again, on a 16:9 screen vertical space is more precious than horizontal space. Speaking of mouse interactions, there's a lot more you can do with it - like maximizing windows by dragging the title-bar at the top of the screen, or left/right aligning/resizing windows on half of the screen, again by dragging the title-bar of that window to the left or the right. I noticed my non-technical wife using this UI and she had no problems with it.

Things are not perfect. There are 2 issues that bother me about Ubuntu:

1)The Launcher is not customizable at all. I would rather have it on the right, but I can't do that, which is retarded.

2) Every freaking version breaks something. Ubuntu 12.10 broke the app "Startup Disk Creator", an app which I was often using for creating bootable USB drives and it's still not fixed. Ubuntu 13.04 broke Skype (though it can be argued the fault is shared by Skype as their Linux port is a piece of shit). Ubuntu 13.10 broke my Bluetooth, I couldn't get a L2TP VPN connection to work no matter how hard I tried and it also broke the multiple-screens support (I don't like working with multiple screens, so when I'm plugging in my external monitor, I turn the laptop's monitor off, but Ubuntu 13.10 can't detect when I unplug the external monitor and the laptop's own monitor stays off). Ubuntu 13.10 is the most buggy Ubuntu version I've ever used.

So right now I'm back on 12.04 LTS, which is fine and stable and I hope the next LTS (14.04) will fix my Bluetooth and the multiple displays settings. Basically, Ubuntu's short release cycle doesn't really work and if you don't stay on LTS versions, then you're in for a world of hurt.

I like Unity a lot. The first couple of releases I tried to like it but was forced to give up because of things like total crashes at the slightest touch, but after that it became good enough and I've stuck with it ever since and enjoyed working with it a lot—though I still tweak Compiz settings with it; yet still I'd be quite happy with it as a basic environment without those, far more than plain OS X (which I dislike for its largely missing keyboard accessibility) or Windows 7/8 (really quite decent now). All of these can be improved with third-party tools (just some a little more easily than others).

Many people in our circles enjoy criticising Unity and Ubuntu; but for my part, I have been very pleased with the direction Canonical is heading, by and large.

Now, as it happens, I've adopted i3 in the past couple of months, as it suits my requirements a little better than Unity, but I would still be quite content with either.

Agreed I'd normally be excited for this to see Linux directly on another platform but Canonical hasn't been doing great work recently.

I'm much more excited to see Valve's contribution via steambox which is based off of Debian. Debian looks a lot more attractive these days as a desktop OS than Ubuntu.

Are you arguing for mass appeal or out of your own interest? If the latter, you can opt out of unity and just use something like i3 which I find I am very productive with.

i3 is truly incredible; wrap the Gnome monstrosity under the covers and have nothing but tiling WM goodness left over.

i3 = huge win

I would honestly pay money for a proper, relatively simple, DE written around i3. I like tiling because it makes me productive and helps me organize my desktop, not because it gives me a hard on to not be able to use my volume button or to have firefox look incredibly ugly.

Seems like those people tend to use the OS as their DE and eschew integrated IDEs. One pane for tests, one for grep/ask, one for vim/emacs, shell, etc...

I'd actually like to go the other way, a Gnome-less setup. Have seen some interesting setups with Awesome WM to that affect.

Bit too lazy/would like to keep coding and not spend weeks replacing the good in Gnome with whatever the alternatives are.

I do this with XFCE and it works really well. You just have to prevent xfce-panel and xfwm from starting up and autostart i3 instead. Replacing i3 with xfwm on the fly also works like a charm, I can toggle between tiling and floating WM's using keyboard shortcuts.

When I try to use xfce components they interfere a lot with keyboard shortcuts. I'm not sure why, but most of the gtk-compatible DEs bundle keyboard shortcut stuff with the settings-daemon, which is really the piece I miss most. It just leaves things feeling more broken to me, but maybe I'm doing something wrong.

I generally add custom application shortcuts to XFCE's keyboard preferences instead of i3's config and change i3's $mod to the Alt key. Haven't had any problems of conflicting shortcuts.

I much prefer having window management stuff on super since I use a lot of terminal apps where alt is important. Can't overload too much there or things get funky. And I have a lot of custom window management keycombos for i3 because the basic set are a bit bare.

Talking my taste only.

Will give i3 a try.

Thanks for bringing it up to my attention.

What do you mean by getting it to a sane level of satisfaction?

Want some examples:

1) Give me a day, one single day without UI crash report dialog.

2) Do not change nautilus functionality without letting one easy way to restore behavior as one used to -- for instance, within a given window, when typing "foo" instead of selecting foo in the current dir, it launches "find" app which takes ages on heavy machines

3) Why can't I no more edit (or even view) network settings of a network connected printer from the default printer applet.

and so on and so forth...

Sorry if I came off a little aggressive. No 1 is my pet peeve, but I'm not sure if I can uninstall apport without messing up other parts of my system.

Yes, you can simply disable by

gksudo gedit /etc/default/apport

Change enabled from "0" to a "1" so it looks like this:

enabled=1

After reboot it will be gone, if you can't wait type in the terminal:

sudo service apport stop

I have used all major Linux distributions since 1995.

Ubuntu is currently the only one that can fare with other operating systems at the consumer level support of hardware and third party drivers (many vendors target Ubuntu systems only).

> Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx. And it seems lie since the unity fork, we are just going far off-the-track - and OSx wins.

This will never happen as long as Linux distributions follow the path of UNIX wars.

I have recently switched to XUbuntu. I tried it a number of times over the past few years but never thought much of it, however, since the 13.10 release it absolutely rocks! This is a screenshot of my desktop:

http://i.imgur.com/BK2leWF.png

The whole GNOME 3 and Unity debacle had me searching for a decent desktop replacement and I was stuck with Ubuntu 11.04 which ran out of support long ago.. XUbuntu is definitely the desktop distro for me.

Yeah, I switched to that too. It's by developers, for developers. I feel that Ubuntu is kind of chasing taillights with this whole mobile business, but maybe they'll prove me wrong.

I run Xubuntu on my netbook and desktop. I just randomly went with it some day and really like it. I'm not exactly a "power user" and haven't customized a ton. It does most things the way I want them to be :)

This is a reply to user 'Of_Prometheus' - you have been hell banned and your comments are invisible to the vast majority of HN readers.

What is slightly worrying about this is that Of_Prometheus does not appear to be a troll of any type. He or she has been posting well-written and almost completely benign comments for nearly two years, and nothing in them seems to warrant the ban.

> Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx. And it seems lie since the unity fork, we are just going far off-the-track - and OSx wins.

I think it's the opposite, it may be differnt, but imo Unity is far ahead of OS X.

I'm also a long-term Ubuntu user, and I've been using the ubuntu-studio releases in my main music studio DAW for years now. As far as I can tell my experience has been completely opposite to yours - the desktop works like it should, and I have all the advantages of Ubuntu (minus Unity), same as it ever was.

Maybe you'd consider moving to another of these 'splinter Ubuntus' - like Mint, or UbuntuStudio - as well? Seems quite a viable alternative - at least my music DAW machine has been running, very stably, for years now.

> Linux deserves an UI shell that will be head to head with OSx.

I think if you want that, Elementary OS is the way to go:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/elementaryos/

Can anybody confirm the browser is usable ?

I've tried it a few months ago on my nexus 7, while it was still in alpha, and it was not usable even on very basic tasks. I can understand that most apps and features were mocks (that was an alpha after all), but the browser kept on clicking 10 or 15 px under where I actually clicked (and I suspect it was a qtwebkit problem from qt5, so that's why I feel concerned : it may not be fixable directly by ubuntu).

Anyway, I'm glad to see this happen - that's the door for opensource innovations in the field of mobile. Having a true linux on my mobiles is something I really want. I also hope they will make the ubuntu sdk portable. As much as I would love to use and contribute to a mobile ubuntu, I don't want it on my desktop and laptop (and this kind of limitation is the very reason why I didn't ever care to look at ios development).

the browser is switching from webkit to blink soon, and will continue to be improved a lot

The browser is still WIP, a lot of pieces are still missing(Content Picker, Download manager, Private browsing) they will be integrated in the next months, also the browser will switch to Oxide(based on Chromium Content API).

Personally, I am waiting (hoping) for SailfishOS to be available to install on my Nexus 5 which is fully Linux based and has the ability to run Android apps. Dual-booting on a phone seems clunky to me... Being able to run VMs on Android would be another better alternative that is in the works (Android 5?).

Have you actually tried it? We have one to play with at work and it's awfully unintuitive to the point where I gave up trying to learn the gestures. It's definitely not consumer friendly and requires a large effort even to be able to do basic tasks.

Are you serious? It took me 10 minutes with my Jolla to get the basic hang of it and after a day of usage, I don't have to think about how to use the phone anymore. It's a lot cleaner UX paradigm than any of the competitors'.

I'll have to give this a look sometime (though I'll likely hold out until they have it stable on Nexus 7).

Adding a 540MB swap file is pretty crazy though. I'd rather not have stuff swapping to the (relatively slow and serialized) eMMC flash.

They could probably look into having the recovery partition kexec their kernel to chain-load it, rather than replace it entirely. The kernel source is readily available, as are init and the recovery/updater userspace tools.

I still think the holy grail here is to just run a stock "classic" Linux userland under Android -- park it in a container, do an X11/Mir/Wayland/whatever port against the SurfaceFlinger, and make Linux native apps first class citizens running alongside everything else. No need for dual-booting or other awkward shuffling about. It'd take some work, but it's entirely doable.

Here's a way of triple-booting Android, Firefox OS and Ubuntu on a Nexus 4: http://www.droidviews.com/how-to-triple-boot-nexus-4-on-andr...

It relies on a piece of kernel infrastructure called kexec-hardboot which to me sounds like black magic - it's like normal kexec but also resets all the peripherals so that they can be reinit by the new kernel. Magic.

Instead of dual booting I prefer some kind of virtualization support to run the operating systems side by side.

I don't dual boot if I want to run Linux and Windows. Less in a mobile phone!

I don't know why I need dual-boot them, plus I am not comfortable to run ubuntu on my small screen devices, though I loved it when I used it for linux development env(and LTS server) on PCs. Now I'm switching back to Debian, first server, then desktop, somehow I think Ubuntu is stretching too thin and lost its focus, you can't do everything at the same time, not to mention ubuntu is still a pretty small company.

I have a (probably) silly question: does node.js and other x86 compatible software run on Ubuntu on ARM-based phones/tables? I do not expect them to do so, but who knows.

node.js and IntelliJ IDEA is probably the only things that keep me on my PC, otherewise I would replace everything with one android phone.

Did you try Googling? :)

http://masashi-k.blogspot.fi/2013/08/nodejs-on-android.html

Wow, never knew about it (Debian Kit). Thank you!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11894384/any-web-java-ide... - even Intellij IDEA could be persuaded to run on Android as it turns out.

Is there a way to pre-download everything downloaded by the Dual boot installer app? My connection is too unreliable for a large direct-app download like this to ever work.

Still no Nexus 7 2013 (flo) support for Ubuntu :(

Yeah this is very unfortunate for me, personally. I have a Nexus 4 and a Nexus 7 (2013 model) and I'd love to try this out, but the Nexus 4 is my day-to-day phone and it would be terribly inconvenient to monkey with it so much just to try out an early Ubuntu release. The Nexus 7 is more of a toy and I'd be willing to try it out, but they still don't support the newer model of it.

What's that saying? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

This looks promising, I hope it will be tested on a Galaxy Nexus soon.

Has anyone tried this on a Moto X?

It does not look like the Moto X is supported in anyway right now --> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices#Working_with_phablet-f...

Ah, thanks.

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