Manjaro ARM 20.12 released!

ARM Releases
1

Manjaro ARM 20.12 released!

We are proud to announce the release of Manjaro ARM 20.12, which is now available through the new Manjaro ARM Flasher tool and 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.

We where also recently honored with a Community Edition of the PinePhone.
Thanks to all the people that have bought a Manjaro CE PinePhone to support this project!

odroidn2plus
odroidn2plus1280Ă—903 105 KB

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

20.X-xfce-idle
20.X-xfce-idle1920Ă—1080 39 KB

KDE Plasma

20.X-plasma-idle
20.X-plasma-idle1920Ă—1080 38.1 KB

MATE

19.X-mate-idle
19.X-mate-idle1920Ă—1080 38.5 KB

Downloads:

Device XFCE KDE Plasma MATE Minimal
Raspberry Pi 3/3+/4/400 20.12.1 20.12.1 20.12.1 20.12.1
Pinebook Pro 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12
Pinebook 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12
Rock Pi 4C 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12
RockPro64 20.12.1 20.12.1 20.12.1 20.12.1
Khadas Vim 2 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12
Khadas Vim 3 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12
Odroid N2/N2+ 20.12 20.12 20.12 20.12

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>.
  • Introducing the manjaro-arm-flasher tool, which can be used to download and flash an image to any drive.
  • XFCE 4.14
  • KDE Plasma 5.20
  • 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 patches for that.
  • The Odroid N2 images also work on the Odroid N2+.

Updating from 20.10:

  • Most edition now have Manjaro ARM Flasher and Manjaro ARM Installer installed by default.

Known issues:

  • No audio cards on 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.
  • USB-C charging is not working right on Pinebook Pro, since we applied the DP alt mode patches.

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.

6 Likes
2

no sway, so why voting?

3

That was the purpose of voting to find out the most requested. You can stll build your own with the tools as always.

1 Like
4

To see which one is preferred by the community users.
Minimal and Mate received more votes than sway.
Most sway users are advanced users who can build sway image using manjaro-arm-tools or manjaro-arm-flasher

It is very hard to build so many images for so many devices.

I hope you understand developers point of view :slight_smile:

1 Like
5

try build sway, it tag 20.10 in version option?

6

Sorry you will need manjaro-arm-tools
Here is a detailed tutorial for the same.

1 Like
7

Hi Strit,

If already on Manjaro-Arm 20.10 and had been updating the system will it automatically update to Manjaro-Arm 20.12?

8

Thanks, but my pi400 wifi broke again?

9

Looking forward to the Khadas VIM3 20.12 Release image.

10

I can build images for sway and provide them as separate download link here, but tbh would have been nice to know before this release went public that it won’t be included any longer… :frowning:

11

Not quite so… last time I checked here [Poll] What editions should we support? MATE and Sway were on par with 21% of the votes each…

1 Like
12

Here we go…

2 Likes
13

It’s not like Sway has been dropped as an edition. We just don’t create images for it. It can still be installed easily with the Manjaro ARM Installer and previous images can still be updated.

We have been wanting to try different editions out.
Sway is a great edition and looks really good. But tiling window managers are, in general, an advanced user experience.

14

Thanks @Strit for clarifying… it still came as a surprise and even though it was always said as being a community supported variant only, I still think having ready-made images at hand will make it easier for the not-so-tech-savvy folks to give them a try.

2 Likes
15

Hi,

I updated my devices and I found this up date…
What that ?

[nln2@n2 ~]$ sudo pacman -Syu
[sudo] password for nln2: 
:: Synchronising package databases...
 core                                   225,4 KiB  1409 KiB/s 00:00 [######################################] 100%
 extra                                    2,4 MiB  1271 KiB/s 00:02 [######################################] 100%
 community                                5,6 MiB  1030 KiB/s 00:06 [######################################] 100%
:: Starting full system upgrade...
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...

Packages (1) khadas-utils-4-1

Total Download Size:   0,01 MiB
Total Installed Size:  0,01 MiB
Net Upgrade Size:      0,00 MiB

:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
:: Retrieving packages...
 khadas-utils-4-1-any                    11,3 KiB  0,00   B/s 00:00 [######################################] 100%
(1/1) checking keys in keyring                                      [######################################] 100%
(1/1) checking package integrity                                    [######################################] 100%
(1/1) loading package files                                         [######################################] 100%
(1/1) checking for file conflicts                                   [######################################] 100%
(1/1) checking available disk space                                 [######################################] 100%
:: Processing package changes...
(1/1) upgrading khadas-utils                                        [######################################] 100%
:: Running post-transaction hooks...
(1/2) Reloading system manager configuration...
(2/2) Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...
[nln2@n2 ~]$
16

I’m pretty sure you don’t need to do anything special, beside updating regularly. Every release is just after some major stable update, they are just making fresh images with the current packages and the release version is a date. But I can be mistaken.

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Install these updated packages in the repo when the mirrors sync:

brcm-patchram-plus r3.bee0942-5
firmware-raspberrypi 6-1.6
18

It is for khadas devices if you’re not using khadas then you don’t need it.

19

pi4 download 2 times not boot, chcksum ok.

20

Updated the original post with links for Rock Pi 4C, Khadas Vim 2 and Khadas Vim 3.

1 Like