Rumor: Ubuntu to announce ‘convergence’ device next month

By admin On Jan 15, 2016

Spread the love

OMG Ubuntu has gathered from various sources that Canonical will show a ‘convergence’ device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It would be a 10 “tablet with a 64-bit ARM processor from the Spanish bq.

There is a bq device codenamed ‘Frieza’ OMG Ubuntu writes. With this, bq follows the chosen path to designate Ubuntu devices with names of figures from the game DragonBall Z, as also the previous two smartphones with the names Krillin, Arale and Vegeta. Currently, Ubuntu engineers are using bq’s M10 tablet for testing purposes, the site reports. The 10 “tablet is powered by a 64-bit MediaTek MT8163 processor at 1.3GHz and a Mali-T720 gpu. The tablet also has 2GB of ram on board and 16GB of emmc flash memory. The tablet with Android is sold for 239 euros in Europe.

It is still unclear whether this tablet will indeed be used to demonstrate convergence at the stock exchange. It is suspected that a new version of Ubuntu Touch will be used, where convergenge, Ubuntu Pocket Desktop and Snappy Ubuntu are combined with Ubuntu Touch. Codenamed Avila, this project supports both .deb-based and Xorg-dependent applications as well as software developed specifically for Ubuntu Touch.

The software from .deb installation files is sandboxed, so that it runs in a so-called Ubuntu Personal environment. Two packages are used for this, Libertine and Puritin. Libertine is the container and Puritin adds convergence functionality to Libertine apps.

Convergence was presented by Canonical back in 2012 and the first developer preview of Ubuntu on Tablet was released in 2013. With convergence, a phone or tablet can be transformed into a full-fledged desktop environment by connecting a monitor, mouse and keyboard to the tablet. Currently, the project is still in the testing phase and waiting for Unity 8 and Canonical’s own video server Mir.

Canoncal declined to comment on the rumors OMG Ubuntu heard, but did indicate that they are at MWC 2016.

Ubuntu Convergence (source: Ubuntu Insights)