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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
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.
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.
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.
Rose's did
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's never happened with Laptops. Why would it happen with desktops. Enclosures for such small devices.... not going to happen.
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
Now it's called "The Chinese".
They offer you any combination of software and hardware you would like, from what's freely available, for a small price. There are zounds of companies selling cheap, branded devices which are simply customized generic devices onto which some generic Android version has been installed. All it takes for Ubuntu for Mobiles is to be flexible enough to allow itself to be slammed onto those generic devices. Screen Resolution from X*Y pixels to Z*T pixels, accelerometer support, 3G Support, USB Dongle Support, etc. and you're done.
here in Romania we have Allview which offers cheap phones and tablets, with Android 4.0.4 and above. A dual-SIM (both SIMs working at the same time) device costs about 160 USD retail price, no strings attached. Of course, you don't get an exquisite hardware quality but at this price you can't ask for it, really. Those devices work, they do their stuff well enough.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
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 look forward to CES 2014 when there's 200 devices demoing Ubuntu and Firefox OS.
Foxconn
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
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.
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
It's a nice idea, but the Chinese hardware market is kind of weird compared to the rest of the world.
In America, companies like Qualcomm release chips whose precise capabilities and documentation are kept under lock and key, and it's nearly impossible for anybody outside of a small, handpicked group of companies to actually get their hands on a chip that wasn't harvested from a device... but customers deemed worthy by the chipmaker pretty much get to know whatever they want to learn about.
In China, the companies who make the ASICs needed to build phones and tablets will pretty much sell them to anyone (or at least sell them to distributors, who can sell them to anyone with the chipmaker's full blessing). They'll also make the chips' public documentation freely-available to anyone and everyone. The catch is, there isn't much actual information IN that public documentation. The expectation is that you, as the owner of a small factory, will buy their chips, assemble them into a device following one of their reference designs, download the necessary firmware binaries, burn them more or less verbatim onto the devices, and get started on the chipmaker's next-generation design a couple of months later.
In other words, China is a relatively easy place for small (compared to Samsung, Sony, and Motorola) companies to manufacture sophisticated electronic devices with minimal ceremony, but it's a very HARD place to take those devices to the next level, and make them anything besides bland, generic, commodity knock-off copies of the chipmaker's reference design. That's why Chinese companies work so hard to make their devices LOOK GOOD, with attractive cases and packaging... it's one of the few things within their direct ability to control.
Put another way, if Shuttleworth wants totally open phones, he's going to have to get really, REALLY friendly with companies like Rockchip. Otherwise, he's going to have to settle for Ubuntu running on phones that are no more open than most Android phones are today (ie, not necessarily locked down per se, but often are more de-facto black boxes than even Windows Mobile phones used to be back when XDA got started).