Yes. Ubuntu phone/tablet images now have OpenVPN support. The configuration is a bit arduous, being a phone, but it is now usable on the images by default.
- No (but it will feel like yes for a while)
If you enable rw on / and start modifying it, nothing disables the delivery of OTA updates. So when they arrive, they will be offered to you for install, as before.
However, the OTA process does a very simple thing to the filesystem. It just untars a large set of files on top of the filesystem you have. Since it knows (because it should be ro) the previous filesystem, this is simply a set of the files that have changed.
So you are gambling. Do the changes you have made cause side effects when this happens? In general, yes. In general, you will have modified some file in the / filesystem, and added software that depends on that change. When an OTA is installed, that change will be removed, and potentially replaced with a conflicting change. At this point, what happens next is unknowable, and certainly untested.
So, in practice, some apt-get installs will largely add software in parallel to the existing files, so will not be much impacted by an OTA. However, one file set will certainly be impacted - apt's own record keeping (OTA's deliver the records used in construction of the ro filesystem). So your system will lose the knowledge of what is there, and what is not.
This is the core danger with apt-get upgrade. It will always be performed with an incorrect database of what is on the device, so it cannot be guaranteed to succeed. As your additions become more complex, and as the underlying system makes major transitions (such as when the phones moved from Utopic to Vivid), apt-get run by hand will do the wrong thing.
Every OTA then becomes a gamble, until you perform a wipe & reinstall.
- Your system will become slowly broken - see above.
Best Answer
You can use the experimental writable flag, as explained in the system images announcement.
Note that once you've changed a RO installation to RW there is no going back. The only way to go back to RO mode is to reflash your device with
ubuntu-device-flash.OTA updates are still delivered to your device, but each one is at your own risk –you may have made changes that mean the OTA has bad side effects. If your device becomes unbootable, use
ubuntu-device-flashto recover.All that said, here's how to switch your device's Ubuntu installation to RW mode:
Start a terminal on your host computer with (Ctrl+Alt+t) and run the following command:
After reboot your device will be in RW mode and you should be able to write to the file system to e.g. install packages for testing.