Canonical has confirmed that the first phone-friendly version of Ubuntu will be ready to launch when Ubuntu 13.10 goes live on October 17th.

The same day the latest version of Ubuntu for desktop and notebook computers is released, the first stable build of Ubuntu Touch will be available for installation on support phones and tablets (which for the most part means the latest Google Nexus devices).

Ubuntu Phone OS

Of course, what’s available on October 17th won’t actually be that much different from what you can get on the 16th. Canonical has been releasing daily builds of Ubuntu Touch for phones and tablets for months, as well as tools for installing them on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and Google Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10.

Meanwhile, independent developers have ported Ubuntu Touch to run on dozens of other Android phones and tablets.

For the most part, if you have a device with an unlockable bootloader and the ability to run CyanogenMod (a custom version of Android), it can also run Ubuntu Touch.

At this point Ubuntu Touch is little more than a custom ROM that users can install on devices they own. Eventually Canonical hopes to partner with device makers and wireless carriers to offer phones with Ubuntu preloaded.

The company attempted to raise $32 million to build and sell a phone itself earlier this year, but the Ubuntu Edge crowd-funding campaign fell far short of that goal and the project was sidelined.

via PC World

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8 replies on “First stable build of Ubuntu for phones, tablets coming October 17th”

  1. Can you open a terminal and run bash scripts? Can you install stuff from Ubuntu’s repos and run them when in mobile mode?

      1. Can you point me to where it says you can install and run all the software in the repos while using the mobile UI (at least the command line ones)? I guess this is also a core OS question in addition to the terminal app. Thanks!

        1. Also, what shell is the terminal running? I can’t find it in your link either.

          1. Here’s a post about the terminal app that includes a video showing it running.
            https://iloveubuntu.net/terminal-app-04-landed-core-apps-ppa-gestures-and-circle-menu

            I’ve also played with it very briefly in Ubuntu 13.10, and it used the same shell as gnome-terminal on the same machine.

            As for software, as I understand it the default phone (and tablet?) images will be mostly read-only, to make delta updates easier (and likely for security reasons), but there should be a way to make the whole image write-able and then use apt-get, etc. I can’t remember where I read all of this, but this post talks about some of it: https://www.stgraber.org/2013/09/05/ubuntu-touch-system-images-now-default/

            (Not connected in any way to the project. I’ve just read about it and tried some of the core apps in 13.10 desktop nightly builds over the last few months.)

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