14 DAY TRIAL // On October 1, Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us all about the new features that landed for the upcoming OTA-7 software update for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.
According to Mr. Zemczak, the day of October 1 was quite productive for Ubuntu Touch developers, as they managed to land some great new features and improvements for OTA-7, such as new versions of the Unity 8 user interface and QtMir display server, which include mostly test fixes and bugfixes.
Additionally, an updated version of the ubuntu-themes package landed for Ubuntu Touch OTA-7, which is due for release later this month, on October 19, and introduces new Mono icons. Moreover, a new VPN (Virtual Private Network) indicator has been added, and the Oxide video player received an update.
"From other things: we also finally released the hook changes to livecd-rootfs that remove the unnecessary apt lists from new images, saving around 60-80 MB of space on disk. That's always something," says Łukasz Zemczak. "Also, QA is now looking into a possible bootloop issue due to the upstart-watchdog kicking in. We have some ideas for a hotfix, but first we want to confirm if it's really the way to go."
An OTA identification will be implemented soon
The even better news for all Ubuntu Phone users is that the Ubuntu Touch developers are working hard these days to implement an awesome feature, something that should have landed a long time ago: OTA identification. If you didn't guess already, your Ubuntu phone will display the current OTA version number, such as OTA-6 or OTA-7, instead of r25 or r26, respectively.
At the end of his daily report for October 1, Łukasz Zemczak informs Ubuntu Touch developers that the final freeze for the OTA-7 software update will be next week, so they will need to hurry up and land any updated packages they might have on their queue. Next week, the first Release Candidate build for OTA-7 will also be revealed.