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Who Would Actually Build an Ubuntu Smartphone?
Nerval's Lobster writes "When Canonical whipped back the curtain from its upcoming Ubuntu for smartphones, it set off a flurry of blogosphere speculation about the open-source operating system's chances on the open market. But which company would actually build such a device? Apple and Research In Motion and Nokia are all out of the running, for very obvious reasons. Motorola, as a subsidiary of Google, is also unlikely to leap on the Ubuntu bandwagon. While Hewlett-Packard has flirted with smartphones in the past, most notably after its Palm acquisition, the company doesn't seem too focused on that segment at the moment. That leaves manufacturers such as HTC, which currently offer devices running either Google Android or Windows Phone. But given Android's popularity, it might prove difficult for Canonical to convince these manufacturers to do more than release a token Ubuntu device—especially if Google and Microsoft apply counter-pressure."
Give me a ubuntu rom that works and I'll install it myself.
Who would buy the ubuntu phone? How many units?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
there was a german startup that wanted to let you build your own smart phone, although the idea never fully materialized. this combined with an open source phone os could find itself a space on the smartphone shelf. the idea of being able to fully customize the phone could have a place in the enterprise.
I'm still waiting for a simple, pain-free, way to turn my old phones (not just Android ones) into simple general purpose computers by wiping the existing ROM. Cyanogenmod isn't available for my clunker.
Isn't that sad? A state-of-the-art piece of technology is only a clunker because its handicapped.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
Install Android, and install Ubuntu's user space in a chroot. Connecting the machine to HDMI would display a prompt to start the X11 session, just as connecting an Android 2.x device to a PC used to display a prompt to mount the internal storage.
I would like to do actual development on a smart phone, and why not? It has more hundreds of times the computing power of mainframe I, as a student, shared with the entire university!
I want an app that lets me use any computer and keyboard to connect to my phone, and use it as a gateway to the cloud, to hold my personal work, etc.
Does a netbook, Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and Google voice count. It saves airtime when travelling + free unlimited texting. A larger screen and keyboard are helpful for the baby boomers nearing retirement. When away from WiFi, it rolls over to a cell so no calls are lost.
The truth shall set you free!
I have little doubt that they are interested in getting a phone maker to make a phone for them. If I were to guess, they will first target the Google Nexus devices.
Phones will probably stop sucking at almost exactly the same time that you can go buy a "white box" phone which doesn't have any OS preloaded at all.
Or better yet, when Coolermaster and Silverstone make phone enclosures, Asus and Gigabyte sell phone boards, etc..
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I would love a mobile OS with Amazon.com baked into it! I'm also looking forward to the Firefox OS, Gnome 4 and Windows 9. The future of operating systems looks amazing! Less functionality, same great taste!
We already have too many OS contenders in the market already. Canonical should instead made applications if they're hot to trot in order to jump into the hot cell phone markets. That said, the expenential bell curve on smart phones is soon to start rounding off once the majority of dumb phone users are forced into the upgrade due to availability. Once we're there, people will be looking for the next best hot exponential bell curve market (currently tablets) ad infinitum... The only areas unaffected by smart phones will be in the ultra-poor places where even a few bucks can be a financial burden.
FOCUS on what you're good at, which is apparently linux desktops awesome. Jump on the latest buzz words with half baked notions of being the next greatest Android/IOS and you'll most likely end up sharing shelf-space with WebOS, Maemo, and all the other failed to adopt platforms left in the wreckage.
Bye!
They tried Tizen in a Galaxy S3, and were planning to release a Tizen phone. Launching an ubuntu one, or at least, having it available for dual boot or optional OS, would not be so bad. In general, take out Apple, RIM, MS (if they make a phone like they did a tablet) and maybe Nokia, and all the other makers could try models with it instead of android, bada, sailfish, tizen, webos, firefox os or symbian, if is good enough. All those alternative OSs have their own good points, but having available an alternative OS if you want to give some special use to your phone (i.e. as enterprise phone more fitting than blackberry if good enough apps coming to the ubuntu version) gives extra value to your hardware.
I think that Asian companies are not out of the game. They almost always use some kind of open solution for their devices, since nobody wants proprietary OS no apps for that. For now, they use Android, but they can try Ubuntu in the future too.
Does a cellphone even work from inside the TARDIS ?
What are you talking about Rosco? After years of various GNU/Linux distributions I settled in which Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS during the Summer of 2012 and have not looked back. I still prefer Debian GNU/Linux on my servers but on the desktop Ubuntu Linux wins handily. There is a market for users whom just want to get things done without any fuss or muss. Even as a very experienced IT practitioner I can appreciate the ease of use of Ubuntu Linux. One of the great things about F/LOSS is choice.
The Chinese will load any free OS onto a cheap POS phone and ship it. And sell millions. That's why Andriod has such amazing numbers, not because of US/Europe, but because of China.
Nobody will make an Ubuntu phone. Ubuntu have said they will use an Android kernel and associated blobs so the manufacturer will just be making an Android phone that doesn't completely lock down it's bootloader.
Why couldn't RIM do this? It would be another revenue stream and they could add BBM to it adding even more money :)
K Man
No
He's referring to Debian, I think, as the perfectly good distro ruined by Canonical's alterations.
what i would like to see is a distro that either
1 has ROOT completely unlocked (and no nag screen when you dare to login to XWindows under ROOT)
or
2 has tracked down each and every unneeded use of ROOT and fixed them
A mounting volumes R/W as a user
B editing USER settings files (btw WHYTF does this even require hand editing)
C any of a dozen or more different "Gotcha! You need ROOT for this" (with a 10% chance that you need actual ROOT for this)
type things
oh and SU is not an answer since SU turns into FU very quickly if you have to do more than one thing or split between terminal and GUI
and on a side note whats with hiding settings files in several different files (some of which override others) even if you limit to USER HOME files??
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Ubuntu is too popular to be cool here. As soon as something becomes popular, it ceases to be cool. Yeah yeah, unity sucks balls bla bla bla... but you don't have to use that window manager. Canonical has made Ubuntu successful. I'm not happy about the Amazon thing either, but you can at least turn it off (and I might not even, as I do shop on Amazon).
It would allow me to access the full capabilities of my handheld, instead of the crippled giveaway shite they now have.
Their walled garden and practice of disabling Features and then charging monthly fees to enable them would end.
The only way that would ever happen is if the whole industry shifted to an open model and they lost market share.
Until someone comes along the an open plan and a competitive network, to get the ball rolling.
I would gladly pay retail for my own handset and escape the crippled device and exorbitant fees.
And Google's ever present butt sniffing.
Rick B.
If you've read /. recently, Linux users themselves will build their own Ubuntu phone with a raspberry pi.
It's called sudoers. Try it sometime.
Sudoers man page
sudo make me a sandwich
...2013 will be the year of Ubuntu Phone??
does not address the combo of Root Nazi and unneeded requiring of Root
how do i set things up so that %User% is treated as being the same as Root (just with a different home folder)
and Sudoers just controls who can use SU
bad critter no biscuit
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Taking bets on how soon someone posts a kickstarter project scam that promises nothing more then pairing a free OS to some POS handset and how many thousands of fools will pay $100 for a free T-Shirt and empty promises.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
My answer to this one is the same as my response to the "who would buy RIM" question. There are lots of companies out there that currently manufacture PCs, laptops or commodity tablets but who don't manufacture phones (or not in any great quantity). I can see them as being the main target.
Lenovo is one possibility. Acer ans Asus are others. Dell has tried and failed at phones before, and could be game for another attempt (and they have a history of selling Ubuntu devices). And the dozens of others, big and small.
And that's before we get started on the phone manufacturers who have either not achieved success with Android, or not attempted a smartphone at all yet. Panasonic come to mind, as do Huawei and Alcatel.
Amazon is a possibility if they don't want to have all of their eggs in the Android basket. They've proven they can manage manufacturing, and no one does distribution better.
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Verizon, et al (with the possible exception of Sprint) have a large enough market share that the small percentage of hackers (classical definition) won't make a dent in their bottom line. This is assisted by the high cost to enter the market. Unfortunately, unless there is some sort of apocalypse or some other technical catastrophic, this will require legislative solution.
It's kind of ironic that the iPhone was successful for AT&T. Apple was the first company (at least I'm aware of) that told the carriers, "No, we're going to make the phone. You have no say. You will buy it as-is or we go to someone else." Verizon said no because they wanted to lock down the phone. AT&T, knowing the number of acolytes willing to switch over to get an Apple device, said, "Sure!" Granted, this changed down the road, with AT&T getting more and more features. But, for the first time, a cell phone manufacturer dictated to a carrier the terms of how a phone would work.
Unlike Apple, Canonical doesn't have the name brand. And their fans are too small in number to take this much of a risk. I imagine that people who will use the Ubuntu interface will be people like you and me, who load the ROM directly on the phone.
I just hope that the source will be released so we can all benefit.
We don't live in Shouldland.
Bollocks
Debian has remained pure whilst Canonical has taken the good work done by the Debian guys/gals and hacked it around an awful lot.
A good number of people I know who were Ubuntu users have gone back to Debian, moved sideways to Mint or even leapt into the Fedora world.
I don't use Ubuntu or Debian (I'm more of a RH guy) but I will stick up for the principles that Debian stands for any day of the week.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
The GP said that the users don't owe anything to Canonical, not the other way around.
Sudoers controls who can use sudo, not su. There's a difference. Sudo temporarily escalates a user's privileges to the same as root for a given command. "su" changes the user's shell to the same as root. "su - username" logs you in as root themselves. If you type cd ~, you will go to /root (or wherever the root home directory is).
%User% ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
is the line you are looking for. Add it to the very end of your sudoers file (visudo). Whenever you type sudo, you will not have to enter a password.
sudo make me a sandwich
Must say I'm inclined to agree with the article, for the very simple reason that I don't think the OS on a phone is a very good selling point.
The selling point is what you can do with the phone. How it somehow makes life easier/better/more fun for you. Exactly what about Ubuntu (Phone Edition) is going to give it the edge over Android, iOS or even Blackberry OS 10?
how do i set things up so that %User% is treated as being the same as Root
Perhaps you could run Windows 95.
Sudoers just controls who can use SU
Or you could read the man pages for sudo and su, which are two different commands.
I understand that it can be annoying to have to authenticate to do administrative actions, but understanding how things like sudo or fstab work will solve most of the problems you described, while logging in and running everything as root can create problems you didn't even know existed.
how do i set things up so that %User% is treated as being the same as Root (just with a different home folder)
That's called Windows and I thought everyone over here agreed on the fact that it's a terrible idea...
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I know some have experienced these problems, but personally I haven't. I could say just the same about Windows 8 since I've had some really strange BSODs (albeit they look nicer now). And i'm running on pure Intel/Nvidia. I know full well there are plenty of alternatives, but I personally just don't see a window manager you don't like as sufficient reason to throw the entire distro under the bus publicly. It's popular to do so, I realize, but in my mind a lot of the hate is based less in realism and more in ideological/social groupthink. (This doesn't fit my ideology 100% so rah rah rah.. destroy it!. My friends don't think this is cool so i mustn't admit to liking it either!)
I wouldn't build an Ubuntu anything. Too much Unity.
I look forward to CES 2014 when there's 200 devices demoing Ubuntu and Firefox OS.
Unlocked. You pick the carrier, if you want one.
We already have not less than four Linux ports to phones/tablets, with Android getting 99.9% of the market.
The rest is somehow shared between WebOS, MeeGo and Boot2Gecko!
The chances that Ubuntu really makes its way to the mobile phone market is the same as the ones for you to get the Higgs Boson in your microwave owen.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Foxconn
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
There are lot of companies in places like China and Taiwan that are able to manufacture mobile devices. Because of Android's liberal licensing, a lot of these companies have churned out Android devices under brand names that you've never heard of. If Ubuntu software is equally or more liberally licensed, they will be more than happy to slap this free software on their devices and flood the market with them cheaply.
Id like a plain gnu/Linux on my phone.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Don't panic. This is just an idea that passed in my head.
Still, I would love this to happen...
Are you saying a more advanced user isn't capable of installing and using an alternative window manager or running a very simple command to disable Amazon searches? I get what you're saying and you have a valid point, but what's going on here is a lot more than just complaining about Ubuntu's focus. It's seemingly an opposition to Ubuntu for anybody. It's throwing the one hope for Linux on the desktop under the bus on idealistic and group-think grounds. It's unrealistic idealism, elitism and smug superiority. There will always bee niche distros and even Linux from scratch if you really want, but it doesn't make Ubuntu bad, or even a bad choice for power-users / developers.
Canonical is trying to be more commercial, and i don't blame them, as you're going to need some of that to really get Linux on the desktop, which I think I recall is Ubuntu's goal. Amazon searches piss people off. I get it. But is your anonymized search data any worse off with Canonical than it is with Google (use Google Now, the updated Google search, to find something on your phone, and it's the exact same thing). and if you really have something to hide you can turn it off. I also understand some power users hate Unity. Well. If they're truly power users they can install an alternate window manager. If that doesn't satisfy them, they can switch distros, but it doesn't make Ubuntu bad, especially for your average user. As for Google being more evil than MS, i beg to disagree, but that's another conversation entirely.
Google is not in a position to pressure Android phone/tablet manufacturers. Samsung, LG and HTC will all be open to other operating systems, given that Google is now a competitor of theirs as well as their free OS provider. Another free OS provider which does not compete with them will naturally look very tempting for business reasons. The real threat is whether Ubuntu can survive in the current patent war. Samsung, LG and HTC have all fought in this war in favor of using Android. And I believe they would be happy to ally themselves with Ubuntu also, given the proper business incentives.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Just like we used to with desktops. Then take them to our favorite carrier. I want a data only plan so I can do all my calls over VOIP. DIY mobile please.
While Hewlett-Packard has flirted with smartphones in the past, most notably after its Palm acquisition, the company doesn't seem too focused on that segment at the moment.
HP has a focus?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I dont know what "he" is saying, but I say that, as it WAS, I could install Ubuntu on older machines that were brought to me with death by virus syndrome, and know the user would go away happy and not bother me for a year or so. NOW I have to install, and spend half an hour installing gnome-shell and synaptic and a bunch of other stuff, and its still p*ss awful because the half-finished tools for adjusting things like printers keep leading you into dead-ends from where their is no escape. If i wanted that, I would play collossal cave.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Good to hear that you're not having any problems. I have, and gave up on trying to fix them all the hard way and went back to using another distribution. It's not about hate and my response was to work with the mailing lists and bug databases, not to register ubuntusucks.org and fill it with over 100,000 examples of things that Ubuntu does wrong. (Mark Shuttleworth did that himself a while ago.)
It's not about a window manager that I don't like, as that was easily changed, it's about sleep and hibernate being either unavailable or unreliable, Wine windows disappearing into the aether, and total system lockups. All this on hardware that used to run perfectly on the old LTS release, 10.04.
It's popular to do so, I realize, but in my mind a lot of the hate is based less in realism and more in ideological/social groupthink. (This doesn't fit my ideology 100% so rah rah rah.. destroy it!. My friends don't think this is cool so i mustn't admit to liking it either!)
Linux users suffer from an unfortunate stereotype of being dismissive of others' problems when they are not personally affected by them. Arguing that stability issues are imaginary and most likely caused by the user being a trendy hipster does little to counter this.
well, maybe not must but its none too easy to get NFS to work with OpenBSD just using sudo!
The real problem is getting netowrk printers to work at all since Unity was relased. Sometimed it can be done, sometimes it caint! No rhyme, no reason, Just caint! - Yes I did file a bug report. After a year I got back an email saying "since this but has not been fixed in over a year, we will mark it closed"! MS is not the only evil in town! Be afraid (and keep those godammed flies out of my disk drive, I said FILES not flies!)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
We dont - we want LibreOffice on Android, but that is the closest we will get!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Stability? So you are asking for an OpenBSD phone?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Agreed, since Tizen, Ubuntu, Android, Chromium OS, Firefox OS, Mer, webOS etc are all Linux based...
The Cortex A-15 has hardware virtualization. Pair this with KVM and you run multiple OSes simultaneously.
Run your android dev environment on your Ubuntu host (connected to keyboard/mouse/screen) and deploy on the same hardware to your Android instance. Read a PDF using Okular (Plasma Active) while checking your email within your workplace-supplied Chromium OS instance.
The power of multiple OSes on the same handset is to appease corporate IT with respect to bring-your-own-device. Buy the dual-sim model and they can potentially be completely separate.
If Shuttleworth wants to make a REAL difference in the future of mobile Linux, he needs to come up with a way to allow loadable kernel modules built for older kernels to keep working with newer ones. God knows, Google's never going to do it. It's an old, tired story by now in Android-land... every new version of Android needs a new kernel, every new kernel catastrophically breaks every loadable kernel module that came before it, and most manufacturers are in no hurry whatsoever to release newer kernel modules for existing phones... assuming they ever do. It's a problem that bites Android over and over again, year after painful year, and it's going to hurt Ubuntu even WORSE because it will initially be forced to live with Android's crumbs and hardware cast-offs.
For God's fsck'ing sake, a couple of years ago, people were using NDISwrapper to run binary wifi drivers intended for WINDOWS NT under Linux. Is it REALLY that impossible to allow end users to wrap binary kernel modules for things like the camera, GPS, 4G modem, or whatever in some kind of thin thunking layer so they can at least limp along when the next kernel comes out, even if the manufacturer is an asshole and takes months (or eternity) to release newer drivers? If we can thunk binaries built for A TOTALLY DIFFERENT OPERATING SYSTEM into working, is it REALLY that hard to pull a similar trick with binaries that were built for Linux in the first place?
I think this is a good time to point out that Firefox OS will be free and open and, once released, you should be able to install it on your Android phone without issue. (It's also running on the same basics as Android.)
I'm not claiming it will be the end-all-be-all of mobile OSes, but because of Mozilla's lack of profit-drivenness, it will have no lock-down. Heck, you can go download the entirety of the code right now.
Of course this was a joke.
Still, Canonical could grow into a successful company if some of there flagship projects gain large acceptance.
There is large speculation about Microsoft buying Nokia since almost two years now. Nokia was an empty bag already with Elop (no more own ecosystem, no more custom ASICs, no more factories, and collapsing sales channels) now there even have sell the bag (the Espoo HQ) ...