
Ubuntu Phone will include a Terminal application - dave1010uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuPhone/CoreApps/Terminal
======
cs702
As soon as Ubuntu Phone becomes stable enough for daily use, I will switch
from Android to it.

Coupled with a powerful processor and plenty of spare solid-state memory,
Ubuntu Phone will allow me to walk around and travel with my entire desktop
environment in my pocket -- including round-the-clock access to everything
available in official and third-party Ubuntu repositories.

(Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc.
when you happen to be without a laptop? No problem, Ubuntu Phone will allow
you to install and run all these things _on your phone_.)

~~~
untog
_Have you ever needed access to an editor, language, database backend, etc.
when you happen to be without a laptop?_

Honestly? No. I can't imagine the agony of trying to type out a SQL query on
my phone. I have a Macbook Air, which is light enough for me to carry around
with me the vast majority of the time- it's great.

If I wanted something smaller I would perhaps get a tablet with a keyboard (or
a netbook, if they weren't all terrible)... but doing any meaningful work on
my phone? No thanks. I can barely bring myself to type out a reasonably-sized
e-mail on mine.

~~~
calinet6
If a keyboard is important to you, the Droid 4 actually has a great one. Using
it with the Terminal android app is a breeze.

However, the rest of the phone sucks, so I can't recommend it.

~~~
buu700
Honestly, I prefer my Droid 4 keyboard to the vast majority of laptop
keyboards. I can't begin to describe how convenient it is to have an SSH
client with a genuinely good keyboard right in my pocket at all times.

~~~
calinet6
Yeah, the MBP keyboard is not really a fair comparison, but I definitely think
the little D4 keyboard is far superior to most PC laptop keyboards, especially
the compact ones.

------
robomartin
Just thinking out loud here.

You know where a market for disruption exists? The millions of iOS devices
that are now being relegated to the trash bin of tech. Very soon everything
from iPhone 3GS and back will be obsolete. You will not be able to update apps
or OS. I have a nice pile of iPod Touch units that I can't develop for and
will not move past their last update (was it iOS 4.2-something?).

You don't have to build any hardware. It's already there. And it's nice too.

Provide a path for a Linux (or whatever) phone to be loaded into these devices
and you instantly create a market for probably hundreds of millions of devices
that will either end-up in the trash bin or forever forgotten in a desk
drawer.

If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable
replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of
charge. Instant access to millions upon millions of customers who will be
facing a very real choice of having to spend hundreds of dollars to get a new
iOS device or, instead, try W8 Phone for iDevices for free. Yes, apps will be
important. For some, this will not work. For others it would be a no-brainer.

The same would be true of Google/Android.

If I could load something else onto my half-dozen now-obsolete iPod's I'd do
it. Yes, I know you can Whited00r up to a somewhat crippled iOS5, but that's
not really a solution, certainly not for a hundred million devices.

~~~
untog
_If I were Microsoft I'd throw money at making W8 Phone run as a viable
replacement for iOS on these devices. And I'd make the software 100% free of
charge._

Never, ever, ever going to happen. Apple would provide the access required to
do that, so you'd need to reverse engineer the device in order to install a
custom OS on it- something that Apple would likely take legal action against.

Add to that the perception that WP is a dead-end OS for crappy old devices,
and you're ruined your brand too.

------
AlexeyBrin
Having a Terminal application will make the Phone more appealing to coders and
old school Linux users. I fail to see how this will make the Ubuntu Phone more
appealing to the average user.

EDIT: Apparently saying something that goes against the current on HN will
start a shit storm (downvotes, obviously).

~~~
jiggy2011
Not everything has to be for the benefit of the "average user" whoever they
are.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
Agree, my point was that this will remain a niche phone.

~~~
Nursie
Wait, so including features that don't immediately appeal to the average user
necessarily means there will be nothing that appeals to the average user?

Your logic is broken there somewhere.

~~~
tree_of_item
I think it's pretty clear the OP's point was only in reference to the Terminal
app, not Ubuntu in general. It's a valid point and doesn't really deserve the
snark in your last sentence.

~~~
Nursie
I think it's pretty clear that the OPs point was that there was a terminal app
on the phone and therefore it was a geek phone that's never going to take off,
and that my snark was absolutely appropriate.

In fact he specifically said _"I fail to see how this will make the Ubuntu
Phone more appealing to the average user."_ shortly followed by _"my point was
that this will remain a niche phone."_

-Edit to remove somewhat unnecessary snark-

I don't think 'your logic is broken there somewhere' is all that snarky in the
grand scheme of things, in fact it's a pretty clear statement of fact. The two
things "terminal apps are not appealing to average users" and "this phone will
remain niche" are absolutely not logically connected.

~~~
jiggy2011
I would argue that a good terminal app can help make something easier to use
for both technical and average users alike.

Since you can assume that the terminal will be never or very rarely used by
average users you can make the advanced functionality available as command
line applications and leave the most basic/common options in the GUI.

A naive user is far more likely to check a box and click apply by accident
than they are to type "rm -rf /".

A good example is a modern version of Windows, the control panel is full of
options,tabs,checkboxes etc that can do weird stuff to your system and
consequently make it harder to use because (until recently with powershell)
windows has never had a useful commandline.

------
yuchi
Want to have a look into their mockups?
[https://ubuntu.mybalsamiq.com/projects/ubuntuphonecoreapps/g...](https://ubuntu.mybalsamiq.com/projects/ubuntuphonecoreapps/grid)
(found on the link)

~~~
jstanley
Unfortunately, it seems to have been mocked up by someone who doesn't know the
difference between a terminal and a shell :(

I would rather they concentrated on making a decent standards-compliant
terminal emulator and didn't have to hack up the shell to accommodate it.

~~~
dhimes
It's not clear to me that everything appearing in the terminal is a shell
response. It may be a more sophisticated interface than, say, UXTerm, with
some mid-level processing for command completion perhaps. At least we can
hope....

~~~
jstanley
This is the kind of thing I'm hoping _against_. I don't want anything "smart"
being done by the terminal; that is the job of the shell.

~~~
dhimes
I see. I would vote the other way- keep the shell intact, and install a new
UI. UIs can be swapped out, but breaking the shell may lead to unforeseen
undesirable consequences.

------
jacquesm
I fear this is going to be very much a niche phone but I just might get one to
support the project.

Between Android, iOs, the remnants of blackberry and the Microsoft offering
there will not be a whole lot of room for a new entrant that is not compatible
with any of the above. A hackable phone that is not tied to one of the three
largest 500 lbs+ gorillas sounds like a really neat thing to have.

Here's to hoping battery life will be acceptable and that they won't spoil it
by tying it to Ubuntu services all over the place. Ideal would be NBR + phone
capability, possibility to hook up an external display and hold the marketing.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Between Android, iOs, the remnants of blackberry and the Microsoft offering
there will not be a whole lot of room for a new entrant that is not compatible
with any of the above

It seems exceedingly likely that if more than a few dozen people use this,
someone (if not Canonical itself) will produce an Android compatibility layer.

What I wish Canonical would do is to do it right. The naive implementation is
to take the existing Android source and hack it into Ubuntu like WINE, which
is almost certainly a lot easier when the source is already available. What
Canonical ought to do is superset Android natively: Make all of the APIs
available the same as they are on Android, so that you _can_ take the source
to an Android app and just run it on Ubuntu, but you can also start from there
and make relatively few changes in order to comply with any differences in
Ubuntu's usability standards and have your existing Android app running
properly and natively on Ubuntu in very short order.

That would give Ubuntu all of the Android apps right away, and then give
Android developers an easy way to fix any compatibility-related issues with
running those apps on Ubuntu without making significant changes to their
existing code.

Meanwhile now you have Android running next to POSIX and developers have the
temptation to use all the traditional gnu stuff plus whatever Ubuntu adds to
make it appropriate to the form factor, which has the developers pushing
Google to put that stuff in Android.

There is a foreseeable future in which Android and Ubuntu end up as different
distributions of the same basic OS the same as RedHat and Ubuntu today.

~~~
pekk
Then Canonical has a second-rate Android platform, on which most people run
apps that don't work so well, and they have zero control over the platform, so
the vendors they are competing with can directly run them off the road.

If what you want is to run Android apps, stick with an Android phone.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
>Then Canonical has a second-rate Android platform, on which most people run
apps that don't work so well, and they have zero control over the platform, so
the vendors they are competing with can directly run them off the road.

Where do you get zero control? Android is licensed under GPL and Apache. The
only way Google "controls" it at all is by funding its development. If Google
goes in a direction Canonical doesn't like they can fork it at any time with
the only cost that they have to fund all future development themselves, which
is apparently what you want them to do from the start.

>If what you want is to run Android apps, stick with an Android phone.

What if I want to run Android apps and gnu apps at the same time?

------
feralchimp
The market for people who want a native terminal on their phone should be
roughly equivalent to people who ever want to terminal INTO their phone.

The market already well served by iOS, Android, etc., is people who want to
terminal OUT OF their phone and onto a real computer someplace.

What are the real-world tasks you expect to do with the former that you
couldn't do, or couldn't do as well, with the latter?

~~~
tree_of_item
If I'm understanding you correctly, you wouldn't need to SSH in to your phone
from another device. You could run something like SQLite locally and access it
from the terminal, or write Ubuntu applications that expect services to be
available on certain ports.

------
zokier
It's bit funny/sad that today having a terminal in Linux distro is news.

~~~
graue
That's not news. Having a terminal on your _phone_ is news.

~~~
balakk
There were terminals on phones even a decade ago:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator>

~~~
zokier
I must admit that _serial_ terminals were not something I was excepting to pop
up in this thread :D

------
eli
I'm skeptical, but I was also skeptical of Firefox for Android and it turned
out to be a pretty solid browser.

------
dobbsbob
Would rather have a bsd phone. Hell even a netbsd phone than a linux phone but
I will accept your Ubuntu phone over Android anyday though I fully expect
Ubuntu to get sued out of existence once they start getting into the mobile
biz. There isn't a day that goes by when Samsung isn't being sued by a hundred
different corporations or Samsung isn't themselves suing a hundred different
corporations.

I'm also secretly hoping Ubuntu is paying attention to security with all the
mobile spying going on and not just concentrating on making the latest
supercoleslawesome twitter integration while they develop this.

------
andor
I think it's sad that the core apps include Facebook and Twitter, but not a
real instant messaging client (as in "I can install my own server if
necessary", "end to end encryption", etc.) Instead of more client
implementations for the same commercial services, the free software world
should work on bringing the state of the art to free (as in freedom) tools.

No, this is not Richard Stallman speaking. I just want to keep my data on my
own server, or at least have the choice to host it at a company in my own
country.

~~~
icebraining
Facebook Chat is just their private server of an open protocol (XMPP). Unless
the client specifically prevents you from doing so, you should be able to use
your own server just like you can with e.g. Pidgin.

~~~
hackmiester
Well, I have some unfortunate news for you: to my knowledge, not one single
Facebook Chat app allows this. There is no market. It is beyond wishful
thinking to expect Ubuntu to turn this around.

~~~
andor
Exactly, there is no _market_ for real privacy and openness, and it certainly
is not in Google's or Apple's interests.

That's why I count on free software to close the gap. Free as in: free of
corporate interests, no need to make money, no need to provide access to
intelligence agencies. I pay for the hardware, and I pay to transmit data. But
the data stays mine.

~~~
hackmiester
Maybe I am pessimistic but I think that Ubuntu definitely has enough corporate
interests to ruin this idea.

------
motters
Really I wouldn't want just a busybox terminal. I already have that on
Android. It's ok, but has limited functionality. What I'd want would be the
full range of typical GNU commands.

~~~
shmerl
Sailfish will have normal coreutils which come from Mer repo.

------
achiang
I just want to point out that the link is for _user submitted design
suggestions_ and is not necessarily official Canonical plan of record for what
will ship.

[http://www.jonobacon.org/2013/01/23/community-driven-
ubuntu-...](http://www.jonobacon.org/2013/01/23/community-driven-ubuntu-phone-
core-apps/)

It's a subtle distinction I wanted to point out.

Not speaking on behalf of Canonical, just in my own capacity.

~~~
sourcefrog
Yes, this: the "will" of the title is unjustified.

"Someone would like to have a terminal on the Ubuntu phone" would be more
accurate.

There are plenty of "official" blueprints that never made it into the product.

------
listic
Just how far away this Ubuntu Phone is? I assume quite some time away, if we
are still discussing features?

~~~
Andrex
The first Ubuntu phone will be released in early 2014.

~~~
listic
Any info on exactly which phone that might be?

~~~
nextparadigms
No info. But hopefully the first one will be based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and
will be 64-bit (Cortex A57 and Cortex A53 class chips). It would be a mistake
for them to start out with a 32 bit version, just to switch to the 64 but
version months later or a year later.

~~~
zanny
One concern is that Ubuntu is probably shaping up to start rolling release and
Wayland support in 14.10, and they face a current real issue of dealing with X
in the embedded space. If the launch the phone with 14.04 (though, they don't
have much of a choice if aiming for an H1 release) they end up ripping out the
graphics stack half a year or a year later _if_ they use X.

And there are still those awful rumors of Canonical writing their own
windowing server and compositor. They spread themselves so thin sometimes that
you rip the bread apart.

------
tombrossman
Yes, but will grep -R give me Amazon results?
[https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/command-not-
found/...](https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/command-not-
found/+bug/1055766)

------
hexonexxon
I'd rather see open hardware before yet another O/S that runs on proprietary
hardware with suspicious firmware. Maybe one day

~~~
icebraining
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo_FreeRunner>

------
shmerl
That's good. Terminal is a norm for regular mobile Linux, and not some exotic
third party application like on Android.

------
ZeroGravitas
Have the commented on whether they're going with Gecko or Webkit for the
browser and embedded HTML views?

~~~
zanny
The apps built against it will be using qtwebkit, I imagine they will go with
webkit. Maybe use a reskinned rekonq or some other qt based browser as a
"default" browser.

What I'm more worried about than the choice of html engine, is if they are
going to use chrome or firefox webapp manifests, because they are incompatible
and one of them is necessary for first class web applications.

------
atirip
And pine as default e-mail client?

