Corona diaries - the ubports ubuntu touch experiment - part 10 - an unexpected breakthrough!

Here is my last post about the Ubuntu Touch experiment.

After a moderately challenging day at work, clearing up dinner, getting the kids into bed, I had an hour or so “spare” to do this and that. Reading the news and flying through twitter was getting a bit depressing so I decided to do a bit of experimentation on my Ubuntu Touch install on the Sony Xperia X.

In my last post I was quite excited about getting Firefox to work and it has been working fine ever since, I´m very happy with it! The Libertine container seems to be working well, the Lubuntu software center (as recommended in the documentation at ubports) has been a bit disappointing as no apps/programs appear available for download/installation, I left it installed anyway.

Anyway not to be deterred by this I decided to go all out and try to get a proper Ubuntu desktop installation up and running inside Ubuntu Touch:

Now, the blue circle was turning for quite a while. After it finished I did a quick restart and lo! and behold! I had a whole stack of new apps which made a bit of a mess of my app tray but there was a whole lot of interesting stuff in there:

Basically an assortment of apps that one might expect from a fresh Ubuntu install (not entirely surprising really 🙂 ). The question is: do they work? I gave them a try and the following started without crashing:

Now how cool is that. My little Xperia X seems to be able to run Libre Office with a functioning word processor, a spreadsheet (I could even possibly run test and trace GB on it) and also presentations (not tested yet), firefox is still fine and even a game of Ubuntu standard Sudoku seems possible. I am amazed at the potential of this system and shall continue testing. I tried to explain this breakthrough to my wife but somehow didn´t manage to convey the joy and incredulation, she said that her phone (Android and MS Office) has been able to do that for ages. Oh well :).