Manjaro ARM 20.10 released!

Strit · 13 October 2020 18:59

Manjaro ARM 20.10 released!

We are proud to announce the release of Manjaro ARM 20.10, which is now available through the new Manjaro ARM Flasher tool.

Currently we have download images for: Raspberry Pi 4, Rock Pi 4B, RockPro64, Khadas Vim 1, Khadas Vim 2, Pinebook and the Pinebook Pro.

Manjaro ARM is proud to also now 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.

manjaroCE

PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

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.

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.
This software is still in early development and does not include all the features we want yet.

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

i3

Sway

Downloads:

Device	XFCE	KDE Plasma	i3	Sway
Raspberry Pi 4	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
Pinebook Pro	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
Pinebook	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
Rock Pi 4B	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
RockPro64	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
Khadas Vim 1	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10
Khadas Vim 2	20.10	20.10	20.10	20.10

Torrents are also available!

Features:

New packages from upstream and Manjaro ARM.
Manjaro now uses a branch based repo structure. Meaning you can now switch between stable, testing and unstable branches by running this command: sudo pacman-mirrors -aS <branch>.
All new installations use a 2 partition layout and use extlinux.conf where applicable. Devices not using extlinux are Raspberry Pi 4, Odroids and Khadas devices.
Introducing the manjaro-arm-flasher tool, which can be used to download and flash an image to any drive.
XFCE 4.14
KDE Plasma 5.19
The Raspberry Pi images can now also be booted from USB Sticks, if you have updated your EEPROM to the latest release.

Updating from 20.08:

Audio cards are now present in Odroid N2 and Khadas Vim 3 devices when using linux-vim kernel.
Audio card is now present on Odroid C2.

Known issues:

No audio cards on Odroid C4 and Roc-CC.
Bootsplash does not work on Raspberry Pi devices.
Lid Close trigger on the Pinebook Pro and Pinebook does not work on the XFCE edition.

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 1 (maintained by @spikerguy)
Khadas Vim 2 (maintained by @spikerguy)
Pinebook
Pinebook Pro
Raspberry Pi 4 (tested on B, also works on Raspberry Pi 3) (maintained by @darksky)
Rock Pi 4B
RockPro64

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

Khadas Vim 3
Khadas Edge-V Pro
LibreComputer ROC-RK3328-CC
NanoPC T4
Odroid C2
Odroid C4
Odroid N2
Odroid N2+
Pine64-LTS
Pine64+
Pine-H64
Rock64
Rock Pi 4C

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.

Alpha images for PinePhone and PineTab are available with Phosh, Lomiri and Plasma Mobile.

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.

pfeerick · 13 October 2020 23:29

lol…

Features:

KDE Plasma 5.19

… just as KDE Plasma 5.20 is released… good thing Manjaro is rolling release!

jtremblant · 14 October 2020 03:42

Very nice update, I’ll wait until someday they have a downloadable image for my RockPi4C.

Strit · 14 October 2020 04:23

Well, it’s not in our repo yet. And better to start on a stable base, which 5.19.5 is at this point.

We have RockPi4C support in the Manjaro ARM Installer, but will probably switch our B images to C images from next release.

pfeerick · 14 October 2020 04:42

Excuses, excuses! Surely you’re not implying that you actually test stuff before you release it to stable?

Well, the sudo pacman -Syyuu on my Pinebook Pro (KDE) was very uneventful, and it even started up again without any issues… so you must have done something right!

Thanks for another great release guys!

v4r · 15 October 2020 08:28

Sorry for the Noob Question, but how do I upgrade from 5.8?
I thought, as Manjaro uses a rolling release update model, "pacman -Syyu’ would be sufficient. I got a huge update today by syncing via pacman (I’m on testing), but neofetch tells me I am on 5.8.14-1.

Strit · 15 October 2020 08:30

5.9 is only in unstable branch right now. It will soon move to testing branch and then, after a while, move to stable branch.

v4r · 15 October 2020 08:55

I messed up numbers : kernel 5.8 and manjaro 20.08 ! Have been confused by neofetch not showing OS Version, only showing kernel version. screenfetch however, shows os: Manjaro-ARM 20.10! BTW, where does it take the information from? /etc/issue just states ‘Manjaro Linux’.

Strit · 15 October 2020 09:03

Only place where we state version number, is in /etc/lsb-release.

nl.smart · 15 October 2020 09:15

Hi,

What’s news with the 5.9 kernel ?

Strit · 15 October 2020 09:27

Not much on the ARM side, but there’s a big diff you can look through for general differences between 5.8 and 5.9.

anon80447176 · 15 October 2020 13:56

Interesting to see that the Raspberry Pi gets more download link clicks than the Pinebook Pro. I would have assumed that it was the other way around.

v4r · 15 October 2020 15:08

No need to download the images when you are already on Manjaro, because you migrate to 20.10 just by syncing the former (say 20.08) release.

Darksky · 15 October 2020 16:01

I do not know about the latest image but some times new features do get added that would have to be manually added with the older image.

Strit · 15 October 2020 16:33

The Raspberry Pi images have always been our most popular ones, simply because users know the RPi.

The Raspberry Pi downloads usually count for about 50% of all our downloaded images.

anon80447176 · 15 October 2020 19:33

The version number should be defined by the manjaro-release package (pacman -Qi manjaro-release). I believe lsb_release -a will read the contents of this. I’m not sure neofetch retrieves this information.

johntdavis84 · 15 October 2020 20:54

Congratulations, everyone!

Are there cases where a clean install recommended for this, @Strit?

EDIT: Also, if I can just use pacman, what is the best command to use to do this update?

nbrr · 15 October 2020 23:09

I’m giving Manjaro a try with this release. I found it unsettling that vi is not included since it’s posix. Found out after a few hours that nvim is delivered in the image, had no idea and I was stuck for a dozens of minutes wondering how I was supposed to edit files (duh, nano).

A bunch of usual things seem to be replaced with rust rewrites, I’m happy about this, but I’m not sure where these choices come from or where are they referenced, and I don’t know what to look for when I run into issues.

Strit · 16 October 2020 04:08

Not really. If you come from a 20.08 install, you can update just fine, with sudo pacman -Syu.

The base install of Arch Linux ARM, does not have a text editor included anymore, but it used to have nano. Nano has always been the default editor on Manjaro systems.

We get most of our packages from Arch Linux ARM, so the choice to replace software happens there.