This phone, which I assume is not too different than the E5:
* ships with openssh (not enabled by default).
* ships with the phablet user account as a sudoer
* has a terminal app in the Ubuntu App Store
* BQ publishes all their source on their github repo
You will need to change the rootfs to rw or else apt-get fails. This breaks the OS image diff update mechanism.
It comes with the ubuntu-touch repo, which is accessed via the standard dpkg apt-get and aptitude tools.
Strangely, there is no git in this repo, which I built from source. Ships with a standard toolchain in the repo also. From this I was able to compile nmap and other tools I needed.
The OS is in its very early days.
Overall its a great platform and hope that it becomes a major player. It won't replace my iphone just yet (it lacks any kind of block based encryption to protect the phone contents).
I have a 4.5 as well. Not yet had a chance to look at the dev side of things, but for a typical phone user Ubuntu is very far from being ready for primetime. (Which I don't particularly mind, as I bought the phone for its hacking potential; for everything else there is iPhone).
The usage that would make devices like these attractive to me is if they allowed me to carry my data around, doing most of my work by ssh, but with ability to access/edit data while I was mobile. Then I wouldn't need to carry a bag around.
I doubt I'm in major market segment, but I'll ask all the same: can you ssh into these devices and run standard unix tools? Can you plug a USB-to-ethernet adapter into them?
Yes. What you get is a shell prompt that pretty much matches what you'd expect. bash and readline, GNU coreutils, tab completion, etc. The ssh client is available.
> Can you plug a USB-to-ethernet adapter into them?
No idea. This might be tougher as it would involve some level of interfacing with the kernel (which is a bit special as it's Android-based) and perhaps interference with the phone's network management UI (Network Manager based).
Also, you don't get working apt-get unless you remount the root filesystem read-write, in which case you lose image-based updates (the only supported update mechanism). But your home directory is read-write and you can do what you like in there.
> can you ssh into these devices and run standard unix tools?
If you currently run Android, you can do this with apps such as Linux Deploy as well. I really love being able to browse my phone's filesystem over sftp (ssh ftp) from my GNU/Linux laptop, being able to back stuff up using rsync, etc.
Probably it has something to do with software patents.
The cost of litigation in the US is very expensive, and players like Microsoft and Apple have legal teams that could litigate forever into destroying any small competitor.
I don't know how it looks in other languages in the list (my basic German is not good enough to assess this) but the French version of the website is quite atrocious. It looks like someone ran everything to Google Translate and put it on the website after. (it's just barely understandable). I hope they will come up with a better website if they want to sell to non-english markets...
This phone, which I assume is not too different than the E5: * ships with openssh (not enabled by default). * ships with the phablet user account as a sudoer * has a terminal app in the Ubuntu App Store * BQ publishes all their source on their github repo
You will need to change the rootfs to rw or else apt-get fails. This breaks the OS image diff update mechanism. It comes with the ubuntu-touch repo, which is accessed via the standard dpkg apt-get and aptitude tools. Strangely, there is no git in this repo, which I built from source. Ships with a standard toolchain in the repo also. From this I was able to compile nmap and other tools I needed.
The OS is in its very early days. Overall its a great platform and hope that it becomes a major player. It won't replace my iphone just yet (it lacks any kind of block based encryption to protect the phone contents).