News..............................
Canonical may have finally pulled the plug on Ubuntu Phone, but don’t fret – there are still determined developers who are keen to get Linux running on your smartphone.
Moves to make a true open source and freed OS for smart phones, the GPL is a real legal thing and Linux machine learning gets faster.
Afew months ago in LXF224 we reported how Canonical was dropping Ubuntu Phone, along with ambitions to put a version of its Linux distro on smartphones. If that’s left you despondent, then the good news is there are a number of ways to get Ubuntu – and other forms of Linux – on your smartphone, with the demise of Ubuntu Phone giving these other platforms more visibility as people search for alternatives.
One of the most popular alternatives is UBports ( https://ubports.com), which has been around for a while now, but is gaining attention as an alternative to Ubuntu Phone. Originally created as a way to bring Ubuntu Touch to more devices, the team behind UBports has announced that the project’s gained new sponsors, Private Internet Access ( www.privateinternetaccess.com), while its Patreon crowd-funding site has hit $1,500. The growing interest for UBports has been helped by Canonical’s move to ditch Ubuntu Touch, according to the UBports community update ( http://bit.ly/2s5Emhx).
It’s also been announced that every official Ubuntu Touch device now works with UBports Ubuntu Touch images, which is encouraging news for owners of those devices who were worried that Canoncial’s move would leave them with unsupported devices.
Meanwhile, work continues on UBports support for Google’s Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 devices, which were popular ways for users to add Ubuntu Touch themselves via unofficial flashing.
To find out how to install UBports images on your device, check out the comprehensive guide at: http://bit.ly/2s5PAT4.
There’s more good news for people who want to run Linux on their smartphones and tablets, with the news that significant progress is being made on the Halium ( https://halium.org) project. Halium was designed to provide a single base that includes the Linux kernel, Android Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and libhybris. This would make it easier for developers to bring non-Android operating systems to Android devices.
Rather than mobile GNU/Linux projects such as Sailfish OS, Mer and Plasma Mobile working on their own solutions separately, developers can access Project Halium to use HAL to work on the proprietary bits of a smartphone or tablet, with the kernel providing the source code and libhyrbis bringing Android libraries to Linux.
Halium is now able to boot Ubuntu 16.04 with a basic Android container, and while it’s early days, some important features are now working in 16.04, such as Mir, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support, along with sound and voice calling (pretty essential for a phone), and adb and ssh for debugging.
Project Halium is a noble endeavour and we’d love to see Linux-on-mobile projects take it on board, but time will tell whether or not they do.
So, despite Canoncial’s actions, the Linux-on-smartphones dream continues to live on, thanks to a passionate community who are eager to carry on where bigger companies fear to tread – or simply lose interest. Smaller projects such as postmarketOS ( http://bit.ly/2swFNbn), which aims to provide a touchoptimised, preconfigured Alpine Linux with own packages for older smartphones, no matter what their make or model, prove that there’s still a passion for getting the world’s best operating system on to as many mobile devices as possible. We’ll look into this subject in a future issue….
“So despite Canoncial’s actions, the Linux-on-smartphones dream continues to live on…”