Marius Gripsgård was happy to announce the biggest Ubports update ever for many of the unofficial Ubuntu Phone devices that he and other contributors to this project are maintaining.
He has been teasing us with this massive update since last week, but now it’s official, and it looks like a lot of goodies have arrived for nearly all my devices the developer maintains with a custom port of the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system from Canonical, for each device separately.
For those not in the known, Ubports is a project created by Marius Gripsgård and a few other developers that aims to port the Ubuntu Touch OS to as many smartphones as possible. Currently, there’s support for phones like OnePlus One, Nexus 5, Fairphone 2, OnePlus X, Nexus 6, and others.
“Since I have had vacation from work, which has given me time to work 100% on Ubports, I am now happy to show you what I can accomplish working 100% on Ubports (please consider helping me reach my goal of working 100% on Ubports here: https://www.patreon.com/ubports),” said Marius Gripsgård.
Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and Voice Call support arrives for Fairphone 2
And now for the goodies! According to Marius Gripsgård, the OnePlus One, OnePlus X, Nexus 5, Nexus 6, Nexus 9, and Fairphone 2 devices are now all booting Ubuntu Touch, and support for the OnePlus 2, OnePlus 3, and Nexus 5x is coming soon. However, the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9 devices don’t yet boot into a graphical user interface.
The OnePlus One, Nexus 5 and Fairphone 2 are the ones that received the most improvements. For example, there’s now Bluetooth and voice call support, headphone switching and AppArmor fixes for the OnePlus One, as well as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, voice call and sound support for the Fairphone 2. On the other hand, Nexus 5 received Bluetooth support and AppArmor fixes.
All three devices are now running ubp-5.1, the latest Ubports build based on the Android 5.1 Lollipop operating system. However, it looks like GPS and Camera support is yet to come for the OnePlus One and Fairphone 2 smartphones. Best of all, the new features will make their way as OTA updates to users of these devices in only two weeks from the moment of writing this story, around the date of July 23, 2016.
Adventurous users can install them right now on their devices by using the devel_rc-proposed channel, but please note that not all the changes have landed, so it is better to wait until they hit the stable channel. If you decide to try these updates and discover any bugs, feel free to report them at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubports-android. Have fun!
Via Softpedia