Manjaro ARM 21.08 released!

Manjaro ARM 21.08 released!

We are proud to announce the release of Manjaro ARM 21.08, which will soon be available via manjaro.org.

You can find all our images on manjaro.org!

Manjaro ARM is proud to be the default installation on the Pinebook Pro and the PinePhone 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 on the new PineNote, which is based on the new rk3566 SoC!

We are also working on getting great support for the Quartz64, but we will not make it part of these releases, until we have most of the stuff working. Right now the main thing missing is Video Out (VOP2 driver).
But you can find our weekly images on Github and in our Manjaro ARM Flasher.
These images are currently Dev images, based on Unstable branch.

Application for flashing images

We have our own GUI app to make it easy for users to flash a Manjaro ARM image on to an SD card or eMMC card.
If you are on Manjaro ARM, 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.

Introducing Calamares

With this release we introduce Calamares as our new First Time Setup tool.
Calamares is a QT based graphical application for setting locale, keyboard layout, User information, timezone and so forth.
This also means, that SSH can no longer be used to setup the system on GUI editions.

First Time setup on Minimal edition

This release sports the First Time setup for all Minimal 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

Sway

Downloads:

All the download links can be found on the website

Torrents are also available!
Because of the new build system, gpg signature is not available yet

Features:

  • New packages from upstream and Manjaro ARM.
  • All GUI editions now use Calamares for First Time Setup
  • XFCE 4.16
  • KDE Plasma 5.22
  • Gnome 40.3
  • MATE 1.26
  • Sway 1.6
  • Pacman 6.0

Known issues:

  • No audio cards on Roc-CC.

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 C4
  • Odroid N2
  • Odroid N2+
  • Pine64-LTS
  • Pine-H64
  • Pinebook
  • Pinebook Pro
  • Raspberry Pi 4 (tested on Model B, Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 400) (maintained by @darksky)
  • Rock64
  • Rock Pi 4B
  • 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
  • Pine64+

What about other devices?

While we do make images for a lot of devices, 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.

4 Likes

HI I use Manjaro-ARM XFCE on a Raspberry Pi 400. How do I update to the new release without loosing my settings?

You just do the updates. :wink:

Manjaro ARM is a “rolling” release, meaning as long as you keep updated, you will have the same version of software as any new “release” that comes out.

1 Like

So this means that when the red update shield pops up I can just run it and I will be moved along to the new version without installing it?

Yes.

This sounds a lot like the way Apple and updates the OS on its devices.

Hi,

Congratulation to the dev team, calamares is now a nice feature to set an arm device, user friendly.
Is it an issue? With calamares I can’t set an user with a . I mean I Can’t set nl.smart but nl-smart or nl_smart.

Is calamares include if I build an image ?
sudo buildarmimg -d on2 -e kde-plasma -v 2021.08.23 -n

The Odroid n2 is working again with your last stable image download on the Manjaro web site :-)

Is it thinkable in the future to boot an usb stick with an image on an arm device ? like the manjaro x86_64 image and install the os on a device ?

This seems to be a limitation in the Calamares user module. It would be the same on an x86_64 install media.

It’s not something we plan on doing, as the filesystem setup needs to be pretty specific and the u-boot part needs to be flashed to specific sectors on the drive.
However, or Manjaro ARM Installer does something like it.

Thanks for your reply.

Is calamares include if I build an image ?
sudo buildarmimg -d on2 -e kde-plasma -v 2021.08.23 -n

If you use the newest release of Manjaro ARM Tools, yes.

Since the last manjaro-arm-tools I built some image and calameres wasn’t include…

I can’t build and test an image today, but tomorrow.

The Calamares stuff was added after 2.10.2, so you need at least 2.10.3 for that.

I’ll test it as soon as possible, Thanks for your reply, have a good day.

It’s nice to see the 21.08 release ! :smiley:

Btw, linux-aml ( 5.13.0-1-MANJARO-ARM #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 30 23:07:51 +03 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux) works on my board while linux (I think it is mainline kernel in the img ? ) not. Is it possible to manually replace mainline kernel in the released image with linux-aml ? I flashed my SD card accidently yesterday so I do not have a running Manjaro at the moment otherwise I could build myself with buildarmimg.

If you build the image, sure.

Just change the device profile for you board in /usr/share/manjaro-arm-tools/arm-profiles/devices/ to say linux-aml instead of linux and build the image.

What board do you have?
As far as I’m aware, we don’t have any board in our supported list that requires linux-aml to boot.

It is a S905 P201 Tv box actually , basically clone of MXQ 4K P201 . I used official khadas-vim-2-minimal 21.04 release and updated to 21.08(with linux-aml) without any issue . Yesterday I built an image based on vim2 profile : (Just switched to linux-aml and commented out some firmware )

sudo buildarmimg -d vim2m -e minimal -v 21.08 -n
## Maintained by Spikerguy ##

# Kernel and bootloader stuff
linux-aml
boot-vim2
plymouth
plymouth-theme-manjaro

# Video driver

# Other device specific packages
crda
btrfs-progs
#bluetooth-vim3
#khadas-utils
fbset
#kvim1-firmware
#kvim2-firmware
#ap6398s-firmware
vim2-post-install

However my image fails to boot and enters android recovery directly . I think I’m not supposed to comment out those firmwares in profile ?

Did you create A new device called vim2m ?

Can you confirm whether the build process was completed correctly?

Check if the image have boot-vim2 pkg files in BOOT_MNJRO partition.

I copied profile from vim2 and renamed it to vim2m .

I checked pkgs.txt and yes, it has boot-vim2 2020.09-1 . In BOOT_MNJRO there are

u-boot.ext u-boot-s905 u-boot-s905x2-s922 u-boot-s905x-s912

and I renamed u-boot-s905 to u-boot.ext . I’ll do further test later.

First of all, the work that has gone into this, and the product; just stunning. It’s really amazing just how usable my pinephone is with manjaro. I use it as a primary phone, and have been for a while. A testament to the amazing work done by everyone here.

After the last update, just tracking two issues. Still having issues with the sound and bluetooth, as per my post on the last update. Also, it seems that the last update has caused chatty to duplicate sms messages when I send them.

Just an edit: I’ve tried downgrading chatty, the problem still persists. Perhaps this might be an issue with some related package?

1 Like

Can we “script” setup ?