Manjaro ARM 21.02 released!

Strit · 28 February 2021 22:24

Manjaro ARM 21.02 released!

We are proud to announce the release of Manjaro ARM 21.02, which will soon be available via manjaro.org.

Currently we have download images for: Raspberry Pi 4, Rock Pi 4C, RockPro64, Khadas Vim 2, Khadas Vim 3, Odroid N2, Pinebook and the Pinebook Pro.

Manjaro ARM is proud to be the default installation on the Pinebook Pro from Pine64.
We have put in a lot of work to get to this point and we are excited that we have been accepted by the creators of this laptop, as a great OS option.

Pine64 also recently announced that Manjaro ARM with Plasma Mobile is going to be the stock OS on the retail PinePhones going forward. What an honor!

We where also recently honored to be the default OS on the PinePhone.
Thanks to all the people that have bought a Manjaro CE PinePhone and will buy a PinePhone in the future to support this project!

Our usual CDN provider (OSDN) is having some issues, so these images are hosted on Github Releases.
We hope OSDN gets their issues sorted out soon, so we can get back to using their service.

New application for flashing images

We have been working on a new GUI app to make it easy for users to flash a Manjaro ARM image on to an SD card or eMMC card.
Simply install manjaro-arm-flasher and launch the app “Manjaro ARM Flasher” from your menu. This will download and flash the image of your choice. 21.02 release is not yet featured in the Manjaro ARM Flasher. Sorry.

You can also manually run the application (if you are not running Manjaro ARM) by downloading this python script, make it executable with chmod +x manjaro-arm-flasher and then run it with sudo ./manjaro-arm-flasher. It requires python-blkinfo 0.1.3 to be installed, which can be installed with pip install blkinfo.

First Time setup

This release sports the First Time setup for all images, also via SSH. This means that at first boot, you will be asked about the following:

keyboard layout (except on pinebook, that is fixed to us layout)
username
additional user groups (optional)
full name
password for that username
password for root
timezone
locale
hostname

Then the setup script will set these settings and reboot to the login screen.

Screenshots

XFCE

KDE Plasma

MATE

Downloads:

Device	XFCE	KDE Plasma	MATE	Minimal
Raspberry Pi 3/3+/4/400	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
Pinebook Pro	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
Pinebook	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
Rock Pi 4C	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
RockPro64	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
Khadas Vim 2	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02
Khadas Vim 3	21.03	21.03	21.03	21.03
Odroid N2/N2+	21.02	21.02	21.02	21.02

Torrents are not available!

Features:

New packages from upstream and Manjaro ARM.
XFCE 4.16
KDE Plasma 5.21
The Raspberry Pi images can now also be booted from USB Sticks, if you have updated your EEPROM to the latest release.
The AMLogic boards, like Khadas Vim 3 and Odroid N2/C4 now has HDMI audio.
The Pinebook Pro got DP altmode support back, thanks to Ayufan for putting together working hacky patches for that.
The Odroid N2 images also work on the Odroid N2+.
Now uses Plymouth as default splash.

Updating from 20.12:

Enabled hardware accelerated plasma desktop on Lima devices (Pinebook, Pine64-LTS, Pine64+, Rock64 and Roc-CC).
The Odroid N2(+) and C4 now supports hardware accelerated desktop. To enable it, comment out the QT_BACKEND_RENDERER=software in /etc/environment.
To use plymouth, install plymouth and plymouth-theme-manjaro and add quiet splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles to your boot script instead of bootsplash.bootfile=bootsplash-themes/manjaro/bootsplash, then run sudo plymouth-set-default-theme -R materia-manjaro. You can then disable/uninstall the bootsplash stuff.
You may want to add your devices drm stuff to MODULES=() and plymouth after base and udev to HOOKS=() in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.

Known issues:

No audio cards on Roc-CC.
While the Odroid N2(+)and C4 does support hardware accelerated Plasma, it’s not enabled by default yet, since it’s slow and glitchy.

Tips and Tricks:

Smoothness on Raspberry Pi 3 devices:
To get a smoother experience on your Raspberry Pi 3 device, while running the Raspberry Pi 4 image do this:

Install xf86-video-fbturbo-git.
Edit /boot/config.txt and comment out dtoverlay=vc4-fkms-v3d and max_framebuffers=2.
Save the file and reboot.

Supported Devices:

Images:

Khadas Vim 2 (maintained by @spikerguy)
Khadas Vim 3 (maintained by @spikerguy)
Odroid N2
Pinebook
Pinebook Pro
Raspberry Pi 4 (tested on Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 400) (maintained by @darksky)
Rock Pi 4C (maintained by @spikerguy)
RockPro64

With Manjaro ARM Installer (in addition to the above devices): (Download it here)

Khadas Vim 1
Khadas Edge-V Pro
LibreComputer ROC-RK3328-CC
NanoPC T4
Odroid C2
Odroid C4
Odroid N2+
Pine64-LTS
Pine64+
Pine-H64
Rock64
Rock Pi 4B

What about other devices?

Manjaro ARM no longer supports the armv7h architecture. So if you have/use an armv7h device, you should be looking at other distro’s. Some could be:

Arch Linux ARM
Armbian
Raspbian (for the raspberrypi)
Ubuntu Mate
Parabola

The armv7h repo has been removed from the repo server and mirrors.

We won’t be making images for all the supported devices. If your desired image for your desired supported device does not exist, please use manjaro-arm-installer to install it to an SD/eMMC card.

Donation

Please consider supporting Manjaro ARM directly via Patreon, Ko-Fi or Open Collective.
You can also donate to our upstream, which is Arch Linux ARM.

nl.smart · 28 February 2021 22:48

Hi,

First, congratulations to the Dev team for their hard work.

By default, on the Odroid N2 KDE, the /etc/environment file look like so, see below

#
# This file is parsed by pam_env module
#
# Syntax: simple "KEY=VAL" pairs on separate lines
#
QT_QUICK_BACKEND=software

Should I change the line
QT_QUICK_BACKEND=software
with this one ?
QT_BACKEND_RENDERER=software

Is it possible with the c4 and c2 ?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

Strit · 28 February 2021 22:51

It should be QT_QUICK_BACKEND=software to have any effect.

What it does, is it makes Plasma use software rendering for the GUI stuff.

nl.smart · 28 February 2021 22:53

Thanks, I’ll try it as soon as possible.

appelgriebsch · 1 March 2021 06:14

In case you want to try out the latest Sway or GNOME image on your Pinebook Pro or Raspberry Pi 4 I’ve created a ManjaroARM Community organization on GitHub, which hosts these community-supported variants: Manjaro-ARM Community · GitHub.

Sway:

GNOME:

craigevil · 3 March 2021 01:23

First time using Manjaro. Just wanted to say this new release absolutely flies on the Raspberry Pi 400. It is even faster than the Raspberry PI arm64 OS.
Plus I am loving the new KDE.
Great job!

serious96 · 3 March 2021 08:23

it’s much more stable using plasma wayland session on odroid n2. But how do i set “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox” in wayland session? because creating this file do nothing “~/.config/environment.d/envvars.conf”, firefox windows protocol still using xwayland rather than just wayland.

appelgriebsch · 3 March 2021 09:02

you can add this to /etc/environment to have it set for all sessions, or to ~/.profile for your current user profile

0n0w1c · 3 March 2021 21:36

What does this do? I run Firefox on wayland without setting this. Maybe it is set somewhere already?

Darksky · 3 March 2021 22:01

Runs firefox with wayland support.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Firefox_#Wayland

Rip2 · 3 March 2021 22:27

set MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to /etc/environment, and check about:support, it say window protocol is xwayland.

0n0w1c · 3 March 2021 23:42

My FF already shows xwayland, no environment variable set. Maybe I previously set something in about:config?

Darksky · 4 March 2021 00:36

According to the wiki above after setting the enviroment:

You may enter about:support in the URL bar to check the Window Protocol. It should say wayland instead of x11 or xwayland.

Start firefox with this and open up about:config and see what it does:

export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
firefox

0n0w1c · 4 March 2021 00:54

Ah, ok. I gave it a try and will again. But on first impressions, it does like this forum. I was getting locked-up trying to enter this reply. Maybe it was just a glitch, so I will test it more.

Edit: It did not take long, to test. It runs very poorly on my system.

serious96 · 4 March 2021 02:50

It also run poorly on my system (odroid n2), i just want to test if running firefox in native wayland is better than in xwayland. but it’s still much better for firefox in xwayland.

Strit · 4 March 2021 07:09

You have to reboot, for the environment to be sourced again.

Rip2 · 4 March 2021 08:16

no, with or without ‘export’, it show xwayland.

serious96 · 4 March 2021 09:55

type “MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox” in /etc/environment. after that log out then login again. window protocol in about:support will change to wayland. but beware it’s not stable currently.

Rip2 · 4 March 2021 10:39

still show xwayland.
ps. plasma wayland session

Darksky · 4 March 2021 19:04

@0n0w1c
Something else to try in a terminal.

export MOZ_WEBRENDER=1
export MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
firefox