14 DAY TRIAL // On the last day of October, Canonical's Łukasz Zemczak sent in his daily email to inform us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA-8 software update.
As we discussed in a previous article, Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 will be a major release that brings in all those nice convergence features that have been demoed by several Canonical employees during the last few months. Among the biggest new convergence features that you will notice after installing the OTA-8 software update, you'll see support for external monitors and mouse integration controlled by Unity 8.
In today's article, we would like to share with you the latest features that have been implemented for the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 update. Among these, we can mention revamping of the Hotspot management in the Indicator Network, fixes for the Unity Scopes Shell and QtOrganizer5-Eds components, and the biggest of them all, support for displaying OTA versions in the Ubuntu System Settings app.
"There were more landings today, which were: a hotspot management rework in indicator-network, unity-scopes-shell and qtorganizer5-eds fixes and a new ubuntu-system-settings with the display of the OTA number in the about page. Starting with OTA-8, each OTA will be tagged and the number explicitly displayed in system settings for easier identification," said Łukasz Zemczak.
How OTA versions are displayed in System Settings
Because numerous Ubuntu Phone users were confused about the version numbering of the OTA updates released by Canonical for various devices, Ubuntu Touch developers had to implement support for displaying the actual OTA number instead of those r-numbers (e.g. r26 for OTA-7). In fact, the problem was that Canonical uses different r-numbers for different Ubuntu Phone devices (e.g. r6 for OTA-7 on BQ Aquaris E5 HD).
After installing the OTA-8 software update, when you go to Settings and scroll down to About this phone, you will notice there on the OS Version entry that it says 15.04 (OTA-8), which is both pretty cool and extremely helpful for users. Anyway, as we reported earlier, Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 will arrive for all Ubuntu Phone users in about two weeks from today, on November 18, 2015.