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Seccomp filters on the Ubuntu Phone

The officially-supported Ubuntu Phones run pretty old kernels. The Nexus 4 and BQ phones all run v3.4, and the Meizu MX4 runs v3.10. Device kernels typically lag a bit behind since so much effort goes into making them compatible with the hardware, but this posed a bit of a complication since the Click confinement model utilizes features of AppArmor v3, which isn’t even released yet. However, we like to push the envelope here at Canonical, so we backported it into our phone kernels anyway....

January 7, 2016 · 2 min · Kyle
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Prototype: A GUI-friendly Snappy

So this is the week of the Ubuntu Online Summit, and many of the sessions are discussing Snappy. As you may know, Snappy is currently pretty geared toward embedded, headless devices. However, it is the successor to Click, and eventually the phones will be based upon it. To drive that effort forward, a few colleagues and I had a session (update: I used to link to the video here, but the Summit server is no more) where we discussed the path forward for supporting snaps on other devices, specifically the phone and the desktop....

November 3, 2015 · 4 min · Kyle
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V3 Technology Awards: Vote for Canonical!

I’m pleased to announce that Canonical has made the shortlist in several categories for the V3 Technology Awards! Now it’s all in your hands: Go and Vote for Canonical! Note that voting closes at 5pm on Friday, October 9th. The categories in which we made the shortlist are: Best cloud computing provider We made this as an overall company: Canonical Best business software provider We also made this as an overall company: Canonical Best Internet of Things product Made this as Canonical Snappy Ubuntu Core Thank you for your support!...

September 11, 2015 · 1 min · Kyle
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Snappy Scope: Progress Update

I’ve previously written about Snappy and Unity 8’s Snappy Scope, back when I was first getting started on it. Since then, both the scope and Ubuntu Core itself have come a long way, so I thought it was time for an update and a quick demo. When I was working on Snappy back when I wrote the other post I was running Ubuntu Core virtually, since I was using my embedded devices for other tasks....

August 20, 2015 · 2 min · Kyle
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Travis CI and Sauce Labs

I think we can all agree that testing one’s Rails project is a good thing. I think we can also agree that those tests should be run on a regular basis (i.e. after every change). I think it’s a logical conclusion then that having a continuous integration environment setup for one’s project would be considered ideal. This is really pretty easy for open-source projects, since a number of companies provide free support for them....

July 5, 2015 · 4 min · Kyle