Creating an Emulated armhf Chroot for Development

When developing apps for the phone, one of the biggest hurdles is trying to compile armhf binaries on an amd64 system. There are several ways of doing this, all with their pros and cons.

App Focus: Browser

These days, most of my web browsing is performed on my phone. A competent browser app is a must. Thankfully, the default browser on the Ubuntu Phone is a star performer. It appears to use the Oxide renderer, which is derived from Chromium (the open-source version of Google’s Chrome).

Bug Reporting

Let’s get one thing out-of-the-way: the Ubuntu Phone is buggy. Very buggy. There are lots of tiny-little-weeny bugs and a few great-stomping-deadly bugs which will baffle, amuse and frustrate. I hit my first bug on day 2: several icons disappeared after updating my apps and operating system.

My first few weeks with the Ubuntu Phone

I have used Ubuntu on my PC desktop since the Warty Warthog release in 2004. At the time, there was a joke that “Ubuntu” meant “Can’t install Debian”. In my case, it was true. I had been using a mix of Windows, SuSE and Mandrake Linux for a couple of years but had always been intimidated by Debian. Within a few days of installing Warty, I realised that Ubuntu and Debian were a perfect fit for me. Using apt-get to install packages was a revelation after wrestling with Windows and RPM-hell. Ubuntu has continued to evolve since then. Despite some mis-steps, I haven’t looked back.

With that in mind, I have been following the progress of the Ubuntu Phone with great interest. Android has been a disappointment, with poor performance and an ever-greater reliance on proprietary components. As for iOS, I find it hateful in every way. Ubuntu has the potential to bring all the freedom of a Linux desktop with a slick user interface.

A few months ago, then, I found myself repeatedly clicking the “Refresh” button on my browser as I endured the disaster of bq’s flash sales of the E4.5 device: the first commercially-available Ubuntu phone. A further period of frustration lay ahead due to the somewhat mercurial and elusive shipping date. When the device arrived, I greeted it with a mixture of relief and excitement.

About this site

This is a warts-and-all account of my experiences with Ubuntu. In particular, it focuses on the new technology being developed for the Ubuntu Phone.