Episode: 1621
Title: HPR1621: OggCamp Interview with James Tait
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1621/hpr1621.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:55:48

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It's Monday 20th October 2014. This is HBR Episode 1621 entitled, on-camp in to New
Win Games Tate and is part of the series, in to news. It is hosted by Corinominal and
is about 12 minutes long. Feedback can be sent to Corinominal at Corinominal.org or
not leaving a comment on this episode. The summary is, a short in to New Win Games Tate
on Canonical.
This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared
hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
Hello everyone. This is Hacker Public Radio and my name is Philip Newbora. Today's episode
of HBR consists of an interview I conducted by James Tate of Canonical. The interview
was recorded at hot camp 14 held in Oxford in the UK on the weekend of October 4, 2014.
In the interview, James talks about his work on the Ubuntu One project and the Ubuntu
Phone project. On a personal note, I would just like to say that I've known James for
a while now. He's a super nice guy and was a pleasure to interview. So, on to the interview.
Okay, so I'm at hot camp and I'm speaking with James Tate. Hello James. So, who do you
work for? I work for Canonical. I'm on the online services team. So, I started there
just over four years ago on Ubuntu One. Got to rest it's soul. Yeah, got to rest it's
soul. That's a shame. That shut down. So, what was your job? What were you doing on Ubuntu
One? Quite a wide range of stuff, really. Quite a varied role. To begin with, I was focused
on contacting, but I got involved in some of the final syncing services as well. The
photo gallery's music streaming. The whole gamut, really. Ubuntu One offered. Well, it sounds
pretty interesting. It's the same the same, really, because I think it was a quite useful
service. When I tried the first version of Ubuntu, where Ubuntu One wasn't there, it was
kind of, yeah, it was a bit sad, but hey, never mind, things move on. So, what are you working
on there? Right now, I'm working on the Click Package Index, which is part of the whole stack
of the Ubuntu, the new Ubuntu software store. So, the Click Package Index is the metadata
store, the bit that you search, so that you can find your Click Index, your Click Apps
on your Ubuntu device, phone, tablet, and soon to be desktop. All right, that's pretty
interesting. So, I would imagine that's quite an integral feature being able to search
and find, you know, the application you want on, especially now, it's cross-platform.
And it's cross-platform, yeah. Most of the things in there at the moment are either platform
agnostic or for the ARM platform, which is what the phones are based on. But I think
we do have some AMD 64 and I three or six things in there as well. Okay, cool. So, regarding
Ubuntu phone, I've heard quite a lot about it this weekend. In fact, it's sort of like,
whenever I was talking to somebody who works at Canonical, they sort of like said that a lot
of the effort at the moment is geared towards a Ubuntu phone. Are you using a Ubuntu phone?
yourself at the moment? Yeah, it's been, it's been my only phone, OS, since, what,
before I got last year. So, it's good enough for me. Oh, well, that kind of works. So, what,
did you carry a backup phone? No. It's your only phone. And what hardware are you running on?
It's on a Nexus 4. Right, so that's how old's a Nexus 4? A couple of years?
Yeah, it must be a couple of years old, didn't it? I think I've, I've had it about 18 months.
So, all right. So, is there a kind of like a list of devices that are compatible with
Ubuntu phone? There's a list of officially supported devices, which that couldn't tell you off
the top of my head what they all are, but there's the Nexus 4 and the BQ device. We have
some of the Nexus tablets, I think, and then somewhere on the wicking. There's a list of
other active ports where people have managed to get Ubuntu phone running on other devices.
That's right. So, if I was to, how would you sell Ubuntu phone to someone like me who, I mean,
I've got a, I've got a, it's a tricky question. So, I've got a Android, oh, I've got HTC One
Mate M8. It's a pretty nice phone. It's got most things on there that I need. It's also got,
one of the apps that I use quite often is, I think it's Juice SSH. It's like a SSH client,
so I can just sort of connect to my server at home and, you know, if I need to do anything
semi-important, whatever that might be, I can do it. So, what would a major selling feature for me
of Ubuntu phone be? I don't think we have a Nexus H client yet. We have a terminal though,
I mean, that's got to be a winner. A major selling point, let me think. It's developed out in
the open. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's, it's probably got as, as much exposure as,
and maybe, you know, maybe it could have had, but it is developed out in the open and we are
getting community feedback and we're trying to make it as much as possible a phone that people
want to use. So, we are listening to what we're doing user research and we're having people
calling off the streets to test devices and listening to what they say and tweaking the experience
based on that. Well, it kind of, it sounds like a, it sounds like a properly interesting project,
I've just, it's kind of not heard much about it. What would you put that down to?
I think it's, there's a lot going about in a certain audience. I mean, we've certainly,
there is a community around it and we have the community people developing core apps
who are obviously quite close to the project. There's also a few kind of community champions who
aren't associated with the core apps would have taken it upon themselves to getting involved early on.
And I think it appears to that audience. It is getting out of there,
but it's not something that we've, we've not done a massive concerted marketing campaign
in the kind of thrifties and people's faces. Do you think, I'm not sure, have you got any hardware?
How about, I read in the news that you've got some hardware manufacturers sort of lined up
so that it will come shipped, sort of preinstalled? Yeah, we've got BQ, we're a Spanish manufacturer
and there'll be seven European markets and Mezu is the other one we've got
in China. All right, so maybe the big marketing push will come when these hardware devices
sort of like get released and come publicly available. I'm hoping so, yeah. I don't know the details
of the marketing plan at the moment, but I do know that the feedback we've had has been
positive. The manufacturers are happy. Oh, that's what you want in it. So it sounds pretty
interesting. I mean, effectively Ubuntu, I'm not going to say Ubuntu, but it's a Debian
based system. Does that follow through onto the phone as well? Do you pull anything from the sort
of Debian repositories for the phone? Yes, the Ubuntu phone, the Core OS is the same OS you have
on your desktop. We have Linux kernel, we have used the same use space utilities, we have upstart
for the initialization demon. So many of the core features that you would have on your phone
will be the exactly the same as you have on the desktop. The main difference is that the packages
the software store is going to be these click packages now rather than debt packages.
It's a kind of an implementation data, but a click package is essentially a debt package with
all the requirements and dependencies bundled in. What it means we can do, we can have a read-only
system image and we can upgrade just the Core OS with Delta to the system image and we do that
over the air so we can push those out. Oh, that sounds pretty interesting actually. So,
oh, cool. Well, thanks for talking to me today James, it's been enlightening.
No problem at all. Thank you.
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