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105 lines
8.5 KiB
Plaintext
105 lines
8.5 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 1621
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Title: HPR1621: OggCamp Interview with James Tait
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1621/hpr1621.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-18 05:55:48
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---
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It's Monday 20th October 2014. This is HBR Episode 1621 entitled, on-camp in to New
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Win Games Tate and is part of the series, in to news. It is hosted by Corinominal and
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is about 12 minutes long. Feedback can be sent to Corinominal at Corinominal.org or
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not leaving a comment on this episode. The summary is, a short in to New Win Games Tate
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on Canonical.
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This episode of HBR is brought to you by AnanasThost.com. Get 15% discount on all shared
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hosting with the offer code HBR15. That's HBR15.
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Better web hosting that's honest and fair at AnanasThost.com.
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Hello everyone. This is Hacker Public Radio and my name is Philip Newbora. Today's episode
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of HBR consists of an interview I conducted by James Tate of Canonical. The interview
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was recorded at hot camp 14 held in Oxford in the UK on the weekend of October 4, 2014.
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In the interview, James talks about his work on the Ubuntu One project and the Ubuntu
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Phone project. On a personal note, I would just like to say that I've known James for
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a while now. He's a super nice guy and was a pleasure to interview. So, on to the interview.
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Okay, so I'm at hot camp and I'm speaking with James Tate. Hello James. So, who do you
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work for? I work for Canonical. I'm on the online services team. So, I started there
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just over four years ago on Ubuntu One. Got to rest it's soul. Yeah, got to rest it's
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soul. That's a shame. That shut down. So, what was your job? What were you doing on Ubuntu
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One? Quite a wide range of stuff, really. Quite a varied role. To begin with, I was focused
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on contacting, but I got involved in some of the final syncing services as well. The
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photo gallery's music streaming. The whole gamut, really. Ubuntu One offered. Well, it sounds
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pretty interesting. It's the same the same, really, because I think it was a quite useful
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service. When I tried the first version of Ubuntu, where Ubuntu One wasn't there, it was
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kind of, yeah, it was a bit sad, but hey, never mind, things move on. So, what are you working
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on there? Right now, I'm working on the Click Package Index, which is part of the whole stack
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of the Ubuntu, the new Ubuntu software store. So, the Click Package Index is the metadata
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store, the bit that you search, so that you can find your Click Index, your Click Apps
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on your Ubuntu device, phone, tablet, and soon to be desktop. All right, that's pretty
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interesting. So, I would imagine that's quite an integral feature being able to search
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and find, you know, the application you want on, especially now, it's cross-platform.
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And it's cross-platform, yeah. Most of the things in there at the moment are either platform
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agnostic or for the ARM platform, which is what the phones are based on. But I think
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we do have some AMD 64 and I three or six things in there as well. Okay, cool. So, regarding
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Ubuntu phone, I've heard quite a lot about it this weekend. In fact, it's sort of like,
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whenever I was talking to somebody who works at Canonical, they sort of like said that a lot
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of the effort at the moment is geared towards a Ubuntu phone. Are you using a Ubuntu phone?
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yourself at the moment? Yeah, it's been, it's been my only phone, OS, since, what,
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before I got last year. So, it's good enough for me. Oh, well, that kind of works. So, what,
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did you carry a backup phone? No. It's your only phone. And what hardware are you running on?
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It's on a Nexus 4. Right, so that's how old's a Nexus 4? A couple of years?
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Yeah, it must be a couple of years old, didn't it? I think I've, I've had it about 18 months.
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So, all right. So, is there a kind of like a list of devices that are compatible with
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Ubuntu phone? There's a list of officially supported devices, which that couldn't tell you off
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the top of my head what they all are, but there's the Nexus 4 and the BQ device. We have
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some of the Nexus tablets, I think, and then somewhere on the wicking. There's a list of
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other active ports where people have managed to get Ubuntu phone running on other devices.
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That's right. So, if I was to, how would you sell Ubuntu phone to someone like me who, I mean,
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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
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Mate M8. It's a pretty nice phone. It's got most things on there that I need. It's also got,
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one of the apps that I use quite often is, I think it's Juice SSH. It's like a SSH client,
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so I can just sort of connect to my server at home and, you know, if I need to do anything
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semi-important, whatever that might be, I can do it. So, what would a major selling feature for me
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of Ubuntu phone be? I don't think we have a Nexus H client yet. We have a terminal though,
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I mean, that's got to be a winner. A major selling point, let me think. It's developed out in
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the open. I mean, it's not, I don't think it's, it's probably got as, as much exposure as,
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and maybe, you know, maybe it could have had, but it is developed out in the open and we are
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getting community feedback and we're trying to make it as much as possible a phone that people
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want to use. So, we are listening to what we're doing user research and we're having people
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calling off the streets to test devices and listening to what they say and tweaking the experience
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based on that. Well, it kind of, it sounds like a, it sounds like a properly interesting project,
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I've just, it's kind of not heard much about it. What would you put that down to?
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I think it's, there's a lot going about in a certain audience. I mean, we've certainly,
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there is a community around it and we have the community people developing core apps
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who are obviously quite close to the project. There's also a few kind of community champions who
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aren't associated with the core apps would have taken it upon themselves to getting involved early on.
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And I think it appears to that audience. It is getting out of there,
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but it's not something that we've, we've not done a massive concerted marketing campaign
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in the kind of thrifties and people's faces. Do you think, I'm not sure, have you got any hardware?
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How about, I read in the news that you've got some hardware manufacturers sort of lined up
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so that it will come shipped, sort of preinstalled? Yeah, we've got BQ, we're a Spanish manufacturer
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and there'll be seven European markets and Mezu is the other one we've got
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in China. All right, so maybe the big marketing push will come when these hardware devices
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sort of like get released and come publicly available. I'm hoping so, yeah. I don't know the details
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of the marketing plan at the moment, but I do know that the feedback we've had has been
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positive. The manufacturers are happy. Oh, that's what you want in it. So it sounds pretty
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interesting. I mean, effectively Ubuntu, I'm not going to say Ubuntu, but it's a Debian
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based system. Does that follow through onto the phone as well? Do you pull anything from the sort
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of Debian repositories for the phone? Yes, the Ubuntu phone, the Core OS is the same OS you have
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on your desktop. We have Linux kernel, we have used the same use space utilities, we have upstart
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for the initialization demon. So many of the core features that you would have on your phone
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will be the exactly the same as you have on the desktop. The main difference is that the packages
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the software store is going to be these click packages now rather than debt packages.
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It's a kind of an implementation data, but a click package is essentially a debt package with
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all the requirements and dependencies bundled in. What it means we can do, we can have a read-only
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system image and we can upgrade just the Core OS with Delta to the system image and we do that
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over the air so we can push those out. Oh, that sounds pretty interesting actually. So,
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oh, cool. Well, thanks for talking to me today James, it's been enlightening.
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No problem at all. Thank you.
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You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
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it really is. HackerPublic Radio was founded by the Digital Dog Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club
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please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website or record a follow-up episode yourself
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unless otherwise stated. Today's show is released on the Creative Commons
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Extribution ShareLight 3.0 license
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