Dear all, since now Vivid is the new stable version I tried out starting of native X11 applications on my phone as described in the German Ubuntuusers Wiki, have a look here: https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Baustelle/Ubuntu_Touch_Erweiterte_Konfiguration#Grafische-Programme-vom-Ubuntu-PC
Starting graphical X11 programs on my Ubuntu Phone is working quite well, especially if you consider that it is still unsupported. My aim in testing was to get a Web browser like Firefox or Chromium working, so that I can you use it for my desktop bookmarks and WebRTC VOIP telephony. I will describe here shortly, what you have to do to start graphical programs. Note: I have adopted the work from the above-mentioned Wiki page. So many thanks goes to the authors! * Make your system partition writable sudo mount -o remount,rw / * Install a PPA with an updated XMir server sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mlankhorst/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-xmir * Install Fluxbox as window manager sudo apt-get install fluxbox * Install xvkbd as a virtual keyboard sudo apt-get install xvkbd * Install some Web Browser like Dillo, Firefox and Chromium sudo apt-get install dillo sudo apt-get install firefox sudo apt-get install chromium-browser Note: If you have not enough space left on your system partition / (check with df -h) and getting error messages during install, I propose a solution later. * Create a programmstarter script, which allows to start graphical programs by just giving their console command ~/.local/share/applications/programstarter.sh ############ #!/bin/bash export DISPLAY=:1 Xmir $DISPLAY --desktop_file_hint=/home/phablet/.local/share/applications/$1.desktop & sleep 0.5 fluxbox & $1 $2 & xvkbd -geometry 540x320+0+550 -compact ########### Note: xvkbd without & is intended. In this way you can close / kill the session by closing xvkbd. Furthermore, up to now xvkbd is only show in portrait mode correctly. * Make the programstarter.sh script executable sudo chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/programstarter.sh * Create a desktop file, so that you can start your favorite application. ~/.local/share/application/dillo.desktop ################################## [Desktop Entry] GenericName=Web Browser Name=Dillo Comment=Lightweight browser MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml; Exec=/home/phablet/.local/share/applications/programstarter.sh dillo Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Network;WebBrowser; Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/dillo.png X-Ubuntu-Touch=true #################################### ~/.local/share/application/firefox.desktop ################################## [Desktop Entry] Version=1.0 Name=Firefox Web Browser Comment=Browse the World Wide Web GenericName=Web Browser Keywords=Internet;WWW;Browser;Web;Explorer Keywords[de]=Internet;WWW;Browser;Web;Explorer;Webseite;Site;surfen;online;browsen Exec=/home/phablet/.local/share/applications/programstarter.sh firefox Terminal=false Type=Application Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/firefox.png Categories=GNOME;GTK;Network;WebBrowser; MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml +xml;application/xml;application/rss+xml;application/rdf +xml;image/gif;image/jpeg;image/png;x-scheme-handler/http StartupNotify=true X-Ubuntu-Touch=true #################################### ~/.local/share/application/chromium.desktop ################################## [Desktop Entry] GenericName=Web Browser Name=Chromium Comment=Heavyweight browser MimeType=text/html;text/xml;application/xhtml+xml; Exec=/home/phablet/.local/share/applications/programstarter.sh chromium-browser Terminal=false Type=Application Categories=Network;WebBrowser; Icon=/usr/share/pixmaps/chromium-browser.png X-Ubuntu-Touch=true #################################### * Reload your apps in the scope by choosing a sub category like communication and then select all apps in your app scope again. You can now try out your favorite graphical apps. ############ Conclusion: ############ Dillo and Firefox are working fine and look nice. However, touch support for scrolling is missing. So they show some ugly scroll bars. Moreover, watching a Youtube video with Firefox results in a black screen and I hear only the audio. Either some codecs are missing or the CPU load is too heavy and the GPU is not used. Furthermore, the WebRTC functionality in Firefox is not working. I can choose Firefox Hello, nonetheless, neither my video nor my audio is transmitted. Does anybody know which codecs are missing? Since everything besides of that seems to work in Firefox, I honestly do not understand, why Canonical is not trying to adopt the Firefox browser instead of developing its own. From my experience one only needs an addon which hides some ui parts like the additional settings, changes the zoom and so on while using a small screen and which unhides this parts and changes the page zoom if one switches to a larger screen. Or at least it seems to me that convergence is not far away by such an approach. Maybe someone has an idea how to write such an addon? In Chromium the WebRTC functionality seems to work, so one could use this for a VOIP. However, the UI font size is so big that Chromium is not useable in the moment. Does anybody has an idea, how one could change the UI font size? Exists another WebRTC client which is available as an armhf package and which I could try out? Having WebRTC working on my Ubuntu Phone is a big point on my priority list. In the future it would be awesome, if one could use the native Ubuntu Touch virtual keyboard and does not have to rely on xvkbd. I also get the following error message in the terminal if I invoke Firefox directly by typing ./programstarter.sh firefox : Need more recent mir for cursor support! So it seems a newer XMir version is needed to get the Multitouch and the Ubuntu Touch virtual keyboard and some other stuff working. Does anybody know if there is an updated package? ############## Further Tweaks ############## * If you need more space on your system partition and only need english and german language support, you can try to remove the following packages to get roughly 100 MB freed (Note: This is without warranty): hunspell-fr hunspell-fr-classical hunspell-hu hunspell-ru hunspell-sr hunspell-sv-se language-pack-touch-ast language-pack-touch-bg language-pack-touch-bs language-pack-touch-ca language-pack-touch-cs language-pack-touch-da language-pack-touch-el language-pack-touch-es language-pack-touch-eu language-pack-touch-fi language-pack-touch-fr language-pack-touch-gd language-pack-touch-gl language-pack-touch-he language-pack-touch-hu language-pack-touch-id language-pack-touch-it language-pack-touch-ja language-pack-touch-ko language-pack-touch-lt language-pack-touch-lv language-pack-touch-ms language-pack-touch-nb language-pack-touch-nl language-pack-touch-oc language-pack-touch-pl language-pack-touch-pt language-pack-touch-ro language-pack-touch-ru language-pack-touch-sk language-pack-touch-sl language-pack-touch-sr language-pack-touch-sv language-pack-touch-tr language-pack-touch-ug language-pack-touch-uk language-pack-touch-zh-hans language-pack-touch-zh-hant myspell-ca myspell-cs myspell-es myspell-he myspell-hr myspell-it myspell-nl myspell-pl myspell-pt myspell-pt-br myspell-pt-pt ubuntu-keyboard-arabic ubuntu-keyboard-azerbaijani ubuntu-keyboard-bosnian ubuntu-keyboard-catalan ubuntu-keyboard-chinese-pinyin ubuntu-keyboard-croatian ubuntu-keyboard-czech ubuntu-keyboard-danish ubuntu-keyboard-dutch ubuntu-keyboard-finnish ubuntu-keyboard-french ubuntu-keyboard-hebrew ubuntu-keyboard-hungarian ubuntu-keyboard-italian ubuntu-keyboard-polish ubuntu-keyboard-portuguese ubuntu-keyboard-russian ubuntu-keyboard-serbian ubuntu-keyboard-spanish ubuntu-keyboard-swedish * The fluxbox UI shows the number of workspaces and the date, so that the program icons are quite small. I changed this by adjusting the following toolbar settings in ~/.fluxbox/init session.screen0.toolbar.tools: prevwindow, nextwindow, iconbar, systemtray session.screen0.workspaces: 1 * Change xkvbd to german or other keyboard layout Change the following line in /etc/X11/app-default/XVkbd #include "XVkbd-german" Thanks to all developers for the fantastic work and keep going!!! Best regards, Marco
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