There has been a video blog post recently published with a review of Ubuntu Touch as an option to opt out of the Android world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTK6TS3pXgc Thanks to @SwitchandClick for spending time on this and publishing that video. Much appreciated. Many Issues amended in upcoming 24.04-2.0 Release When I watched that video referenced above, I continuously thought: ah... this is…
The next Ubuntu Touch major release is approaching rapidly, yesterday we reached a major step in the preparation of the upcoming Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 release: The branching-off (see below on what that is). Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta is Now Available Part of this development release step is the publication of the 24.04-2.0 Beta release images, for more details and information see:…
In the process of preparing a major Ubuntu Touch release (v24.04-2.0, coming soon...) we will also update Ayatana Indicators in Ubuntu Touch. Last week various new features have been added to some of the indicators (toggle switch to keep the display switched on permanently, blue tooth pairing agent, redesign of the keyboard indicator, etc.) and those changes require translation updates. If you…
Some of you might have noticed that the recent (or rather: previous) version of libayatana-appindicator (v0.5.94) notified users and developers of the library being deprecated. This short post is to notify you, that with today's libayatana-appindicator v0.6.0 release [1] this deprecation warning has now been removed again. Another new feature (added to AppIndicator without ABI breakage) is tooltip…
Official announcement European Voxit community strengthens digital sovereignty: shared codebase completed. Read the official announcement at: https://www.voxit.org/european-voxit-community-strengthens-digital-sover... The Voxit community and platform development The Voxit participation platform is originally based on the open source Polis platform developed by The Computational Democracy Project…
Yesterday, I had to add support for running KVM virtual machines inside an LXC container. More as a reminder to myself, in case I ever have to do this again, here the simple recipe: LXC Container Config Adjustment Enable lxc.autodev and execute hook script to be executed after initial /dev creation (updated 20260428: lxc.cgroup2.* instead of lxc.cgroup.* ): [...] # Auto-create /dev nodes and add…
Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026) Just a quick invitation to an in-person event in Tilburg, the Netherlands. All people interested in the Lomiri Operating Environment are invited to join us at the Lomiri Codefest [codefest] taking place on May 16-17 (participation is free of charge). We are hiring Lomiri developers And as another side node, we still have budget (until 07/2027) for 2-3…
On 25th Oct 2025, I announced via my personal blog and on Mastodon that Fre(i)e Software GmbH was hiring. The hiring process was a mix of asking developers I know and waiting for new people to apply. At the beginning of November 2025 / in mid November 2025, we started with 13 developers (all part-time) to work on various topics around Lomiri (upstream and downstream). Note that the below…
Debian Lomiri for Debian 13 (previous project) In our previous project around Debian and Lomiri (lasting until July 2025), we achieved to get Lomiri 0.5.0 (and with it another 130 packages) into Debian (with two minor exceptions [1]) just in time for the Debian 13 release in August 2025. Debian Lomiri for Debian 14 At DebConf in Brest, a follow-up project has been designed between the project…
We at Fre{i}e Software GmbH now have a confirmed budget for working on Debian based tablets with the special goal to use them for educational purposes (i.e. in schools). Those Debian Edu tablets shall be powered by the Lomiri Operating Environment (that same operating environment that is powering Ubuntu Touch). That said, we are hiring developers (full time, part time) [*] [**]: Lomiri developers…
After (quite) a summer break, here comes the 4th article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Have fun with the read on Guido's work on Polis, Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series Introduction Initial evaluation and adaptation Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals Creating (a) new…
Here comes the 3rd article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis, Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series Introduction Initial evaluation and adaptation Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals (this article) Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis…
Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo In Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri, Maciej Sopyło has updated Lomiri's Weather App to operate against a different weather forecast provider (Open Meteo). Additionally, the new implementation is generic and pluggable, so other weather data providers can be added-in later. Big thanks to Maciej for working on this just in time (the previous implementation's API has recently…
Here comes the 2nd article of the 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis, Mike Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series Introduction Initial evaluation and adaptation (this article) Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis Current status…
This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project. Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months, Mike A team lead by Raoul Kramer/ BetaBreak is currently adapting Polis for evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and…
This is a call for testing of Debian Edu based on Debian bookworm. With the Debian 12.5 point release all required packages have landed in the Debian Edu ISO images that allow you to install a Debian Edu system based on Debian 12. ISO Image Downloads You can find the Blueray Disc ISO image (use for main server installation) at:…
Yesterday, the UBports core developer team released Ubuntu Touch Focal OTA-1 (In fact, Raoul, Marius and I were in a conference call when Marius froze and said: the PR team already posted the release blog post; the post is out, but we haven't released yet... ahhhh... panic... Shall I?, Marius said, and we said: GO!!! This is why the release occurred in public five hours ahead of schedule. OMG.)…
Prologue For over a year now, Fre(i)e Software GmbH (my company) is involved in Ubuntu Touch development. The development effort currently is handled by a mix of paid and voluntary developers/contributors under the umbrella of the UBports Foundation. We are approaching the official first release of Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with rapid pace. And, if you are a non-Englisch native speaker, we'd like to ask…
What is Ubuntu Touch? (And what does sunweaver have to do with it?) With Ubuntu Touch, the UBports Foundation offers a truly unique mobile experience - a viable alternative to Android and iOS. The UBports community provides a free and open-source GNU/Linux-based mobile operating system. One that can be installed and used today. Currently, there is an intensive effort going on lifting Ubuntu Touch…
For those, who haven't realized, yet: MATE 1.26 has now been uploaded to Debian and should be available in Debian testing to all happy testers. During December, me and the whole family, we had been infected with Covid-19. All of us have recovered well, by now. In fact, I was very happy about a proper fever which I haven't had in years. (Fever is a well-known form of cancer prevention /…
More as a reminder to myself, but possibly also helpful to other people who want to use Firefox on a tablet running Debian... Without the below adjustment, finger gestures in Firefox running on a tablet result in image moving, text highlighting, etc. (operations related to copy+paste). Not the intuitively expected behaviour... If you use e.g. GNOME on Wayland for your tablet and want to enable…
An interesting mindset overcome by reality... Also, lintian does not differentiate between between 100.000 and 1.000.000. W: ayatana-indicator-display: improbable-bug-number-in-closes 1000143 N: N: The most recent changelog closes a low-numbered bug number. While this is distantly possible, it's more likely a typo or N: a placeholder value that mistakenly wasn't filled in. N: N: Visibility:…
We (Robert Tari, the UBports developers team, myself) are very close to releasing Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x. The work on Ayatana Indicators is currently nearly completed funded by the UBports Foundation and over the past half year, many many changes, improvements and clean-ups have been added to the code. Ayatana Indicators 0.9.x will be the first release series to be in the development tree of…
In this blog post, I will cover a few related but also different topics around X2Go - the GNU/Linux based remote computing framework. Introduction and Catch Up For those, who haven't come across X2Go, so far... With X2Go [0] you can log into remote GNU/Linux machines graphically and launch headless desktop environments, seamless/published applications or access an already running desktop session…
For a customer project, I recently needed to take a closer look at best strategies of deploying Chromium settings to thrillions of client machines in a corporate network. Unfortunately, the information on how to deploy site-wide Chromium browser policies are a little scattered over the internet and the intertwining of Chromium preferences and Chromium policies required deeper introspection. Here,…
Over the past days, I have received tons of positive feedback on my previous blog post about forming the Debian BBB Packaging Team [1]. Feedback arrived via mail, IRC, [matrix] and Mastodon. Awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks... Therefore, here comes a short ... Heads-Up on the current Ongoings ... around packaging BigBlueButton for Debian: While looking at Kurento Media Server, we…
Today, Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been contracted for packaging Kurento Media Server for Debian. This packaging project will be funded by GUUG e.V. (the German Unix User Group e.V.). A big thanks to the people from GUUG e.V. for making this packaging project possible. About Kurento Media Server Kurento is an open source software project providing a platform suitable for creating modular…
Recently, I bought an Acer Spin 3 Convertible Notebook for the company and provided it to Robert Tari for his daily work on Ayatana Indicators (which currently is funded by the UBports Foundation via my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH ). Some days ago Robert reported back about a sleepless night he spent with that machine... He got stuck with a tricky issue regarding the installation of Manjaro…
Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri. Recent Uploads to Debian related to Lomiri (Feb - May 2021) Over the past 4 months I attended 14 of the weekly scheduled UBports development sync sessions and worked on the…
This is a very short notice that I am not available via Freenode anymore. You can now reach me and the projects I am involved in (#x2go, #arctica, #ayatana-indicators) via the libera.chat IRC network. Of course, I am also available and hanging out on OFTC IRC for all Debian related topics. For details on the reasoning, I noticed that I am fully aligned with Antoine Beaupré's statements in his…