My company is looking at the possibility of porting Manjaro Arm (+Plasma Mobile) to a new handset.
I don’t know if it’s relevant, but the candidate hardware all run Ubuntu Touch.
My questions are:
I’d appreciate any info on our options.
Kind regards,
S
Which company and why Manjaro Arm?
Yes it is possible as long as halium works but not possible with Plasma mobile as they have dropped supporr for halium currently only Lomiri UI will work.
Not plasma mobile but Lomiri.
Currently no. It is still wip.
Yes possible. Please DM me I know someone who is working on it so you can coordinate with him.
Cheers.
Thanks for the info.
I cannot currently disclose the company, we’re undergoing funding round so everything makes everyone twichy.
Once we secure funding, I’d be more then happy to share publicly.
As for why Manjaro: We’re looking at different options to suit our needs which can be summed as “as close to mainline kernel + as close to sane userland” (sane implies the ability to develop with golang and rust as well as using either GTK, QT or possibly flutter (don’t know if this is possible). We would also need to utilize ebpf/xdp, cgroups, possibly other kernel semantics.
We’re currently looking which hardware would be a sensible choice to start with.
I’d be happy to dm you once I can guarantee project funding.
Kind regards,
S.
It is possible to use Flutter in this context. You can check this following session from Linux Embedded Conference Europe 2020 for some in-depth info.
Currently the official Linux desktop support for Flutter utilizes GTK embedder. Recently, support for Linux aarch64 host has been merged to master 
It works okey but I feel that a slimmer embedder would be needed to take full advantage.
On the side of cross-compiling Flutter apps from x64 to aarch64 machine - follow these two PRs:
There are Flutter alternatives that do support Wayland natively (flutter-go-desktop being one of the popular ones) and Hidenori Matsubayashi from Sony is working on Wayland/DRM implementation targeting embedded devices specifically. Afaik his embedder will be released on Sony’s github page first once it’s ready.
No idea what Toyota are doing or the state of their embedder. If it wasn’t for Flutter Engage event, I wouldn’t have know they are working on one.
Sure, let’s see how it goes. Feel free to contact me also from the company side as we have great partners around mobile devices and app development too.
It would be nice if there is tutorial to build manjaro to phone from scratch.
Think the biggest problem is having a working linux kernel for that device. Without that you can’t use any distro. I’ve only ever built android kernels but think it’s very difficult to build a linux kernel for a device if you only have the android source code
Hello and welcome to the forum,
There is no fixed method to port manjaro to a phone.
It all depends on the device.
Philip,
Thank you for your reply. How can we contact you?
S.
Simply write me an email or PM.