I was in Shanghai las week, for my first time in China. I was mesmerised by it at times, and this time lapse video has appeared in my newsfeed in a timely fashion.
Worth noting that I never saw it that clear – there was alway a (fairly unpleasant) smog in the air.
Last week, I attended Mobile Asia Expo (MAE) in Shanghai. It was my first experience of China, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed it. I got the chance to meet lots of folk from Canonical, as we all arrived from around the world to attend the trade show.
One of my tasks was to assist the London marketing team with loading the demo build we selected for showing off at the show. If you’d like to see it as well (what, you couldn’t fly to Shanghai to see it?), you can simply load it from our servers.
You’ll need a Nexus 4 or a Nexus 10 device, and you need to be prepared to replace the android software on it (you can go back). You need to setup the phablet-flash tool. The desktop setup part of our install instructions are sufficient, but the whole document is worth a read (this is still developer territory, and not quite for end users yet). Connect the device via it’s USB cable to your host Ubuntu desktop.
If your device has already been modified to run adb as root, the instructions are simple:
$ phablet-flash --legacy --revision raring/monthly-06
$ phablet-network-setup
$ phablet-demo-setup
phablet-network-setup clones the current settings from the host laptop. If that’s not what you want you can configure the phone using it’s UI, before running phablet-demo-setup.
Note that you need ‘–legacy’ because our engineering teams have already moved forward to a new way of hosting the Android parts, and last weeks trade show image is old-style!
If your device needs to be prepared from scratch (it’s just come out of the box), then you need to use some extra steps:
First, boot the device to the bootloader (hold down the power key and volume down), and unlock it:
$ fastboot oem unlock
Now partition the storage, and format the data partitions:
$ fastboot -w
Now, download the binaries we’ll need.
$ phablet-flash -b -d mako -D --legacy --revision raring/monthly-06
Now load on the custom recovery image:
$ fastboot flash recovery ~/Downloads/phablet-flash/ubuntu-touch-preview/raring/raring/monthly-06/raring-preinstalled-recovery-armel+mako.img
Now, boot to recovery mode (select it from the bootloader menu), which has a working adb. We can push a zip to ‘/sdcard/autodeploy.zip’ and the recovery tool will flash it at next boot. First, do the android BSP:
$ adb push ~/Downloads/phablet-flash/ubuntu-touch-preview/raring/raring/monthly-06/raring-preinstalled-armel+mako.zip /sdcard/autodeploy.zip
$ adb reboot recovery
When the device has rebooted, and settles down to the charging icon, reboot it by hand to the recovery mode again, by booting to the bootloader and selecting recovery mode. We can now flash Ubuntu onto it:
$ adb push ~/Downloads/phablet-flash/ubuntu-touch-preview/raring/raring/monthly-06/raring-preinstalled-phablet-armhf.zip /sdcard/autodeploy.zip
$ adb reboot recovery
Now the device will boot into ubuntu, and you can add the demo content as before:
$ phablet-network-setup
$ phablet-demo-setup
If you have a Nexus 10, then substitute ‘manta’ where you see ‘mako’ above. Note that it needs both volume keys and the power button held down to get to the bootloader.
I found that sometimes this build would not populate the people lens correctly, or show the thumbnail pictures of contacts. I found that a reboot (after opening contacts in the phone app) worked to resolve it.
If you’re curious what changed to make these images ‘legacy’, it was the container switch, announced here.
Or two ways to install Ubuntu 13.04 on a ‘MacBook Pro, 13″ with Retina display’ (also known as MacBookPro10,2)…
Having recently joined Canonical, my first task was to provision a laptop to work on, naturally running Ubuntu. Asking for advice about which models to choose, I was advised to seek out designs with Intel wifi & graphics adaptors, presumably down to the quality of the open source drivers available. The 13″ retina MacBook has a screen I wanted to use, and met half the criteria – it uses Intel graphics. I was also encouraged to believe that installing on a modern Mac had gotten a lot easier than the information readily available suggests, so I gambled on the wifi requirement. It seems to have paid off.
The major decision is how to host OS X. You need to maintain a copy to host the firmware updates occasionally issued by Apple – they make no pretense to support anything other than OS X as a host for these.
You can elect to have OS X on an external drive, or keep an internal partition with it on. The first implies that when the external drive is not connected, the PC will be ‘single booting’ to Ubuntu, and the internal storage can be entirely managed by Ubuntu. The second option implies a ‘dual boot’ setup, and dividing the internal storage between the two operating systems. Having chosen a single boot or dual boot configuration, a secondary decision is how to select between this OS X instance and Ubuntu at boot time. The Mac’s boot manager ‘Startup Manager‘ can easily cope with multiple boot options, but it does prefer to manage instances of OS X. I only enjoy using it when it can be used as with OS X, booting straight to some preferred default unless keys are held down. rEFInd is an excellent alternative boot manager, and I’ve used it in the dual boot configuration.
You need:
options snd-hda-intel model=mbp101You will need:
Note that rEFInd is not needed – whenever you want access to OS X, Apple’s Startup Manager can offer the option.
Whenever you want to boot to OS X you need to insert your usb key, and use ‘option/alt’ during boot to select it.
$ sudo mkdir /boot/efi
$ sudo mount /dev/sda1 /boot/efi
$ sudo mv /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT
$ sudo mv /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/grubx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFIoptions snd-hda-intel model=mbp101If you’ve got one, the Thunderbolt ethernet adaptor works, and removes the need to install 3rd party software at install time to get on the internet. I assume you could then choose exactly which third party software you install post-setup, and get the wifi that way.
As far as what works, the screen is gorgeous, but I think it’s worth tweaking font sizes and so on to trade readability & screen real estate (Unity Tweak Tool is your friend). I like that Ubuntu gives me more choices here than OS X. The ‘function’ keys above the keyboard work similarly to OS X, with all but the launchpad (!) and mission control buttons mapping to Ubuntu functions. The keyboard & screen backlights work, as do the audio controls. The trackpad can be configured to support two finger scrolling in the same fashion as OS X, if you’re like me and already habituated to that.
It appears that an Apple ID is optional during setup of your OS X image, and the App Store still provides OS and firmware updates to machines without a logged in ID.
FWIW, I can see no reason you couldn’t configure a dual boot system to encrypt the Ubuntu installation, but the wizard can’t help you, and I’ve not explored the options (my machine single boots).
If you’re willing to live without OS X entirely you have two recovery options if you want to uninstall Ubuntu and return to OS X. You can create a standalone recovery USB key (needs less space than an OS X bootable disk), or you can depend on the internet recovery mode available in the Apple Startup Manager.
Ubuntu 13.04 is available in at least 3 desktop flavors: 32bit, 64bit, and ’64bit Mac’. Whilst the 32bit one clearly can work (I tried it, the OS did boot), you end up using a BIOS compatibility shim that Apple seem to have only intended for use with Windows. Having used the plain 64 bit install a lot while writing this, I did briefly try the mac flavour. My notes are poor, but I recall it didn’t work well on this modern Mac. Given the current support in the standard 64 bit installer, there seems to be no need to use it. Fortunately the default download page contains apparently good advice to select the standard 64 bit verson for a modern PC.
The built in microphone not working had me puzzled for a while, and I used a USB headset until I found the workaround. I was looking for information on hotplugging thunderbolt (which seems not to work yet), and found an installation guide for Fedora 18 that noted the crucial step of letting snd_hda_intel know it is running on an mpb101. With this step the built in audio is fully functional.
I am indebted to James Jesudason for his tutorial for installing on the 15″ Macbook for setting me on the right track.