Just an update from my side:
I managed to load some default skills if I specify them in the ~/.mycroft/mycroft.conf configuration file in the skills section as follows:
// General skill values
"skills": {
// Directory to look for user skills
//“directory”: “~/.mycroft/skills”,
“directory”: “/opt/mycroft/skills”,
// TODO: Old unused kludge, remove from code
"stop_threshold": 2.0,
// Enable auto update by msm
"auto_update": true,
// blacklisted skills to not load
"blacklisted_skills": [“skill-media”, “send_sms”, “skill-wolfram-alpha”],
// priority skills to be loaded first
"priority_skills": [“skill-pairing”, “skill-date-time”, “ping-skill”, “skill-joke”, “mycroft-timer”, “skill-alarm”, “skill-speak”, “skill-installer” , “skill-npr-news”, “skill-configuration”, “skill-singing”, “skill-stock”, “skill-stop”, “skill-weather”, “skill-wiki”, “calculator-skill”, “skill-reminder”, “fallback-aiml”, “fallback-duckduckgo”, “fallback-wolfram-alpha”, “fallback-unknown” ],
// Minimum time since last skill updata to force an update on startup
"startup_update_required_time": 12
},
If I don’t specify each skill in “priority_skills” then it simply doesn’t get loaded automatically.
This is true for the master branch and dev branch, both exhibit the same behavior on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 17.10.