Manjaro ARM Beta 14 with Plasma Mobile (PinePhone / PinePhone Pro)

We are happy to present our 14th Beta Release of the Manjaro Plasma-Mobile edition for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro.

This image includes

  • Kernel 6.1.0-rc8 optimized for the Pinephone
  • Frameworks 5.100
  • Plasma 5.26.4
  • Plasma-Mobile apps, which are bundled as Plamo Gear 22.11
  • Maui Apps 2.2.1 and
  • Camera app Megapixels 1.5.2
  • PulseAudio 16.1
  • Appimagelauncher 2.2.0 and
  • our Pico-Wizard for easy initial setup at first launch

With Plamo Gear and the Maui Apps applications for all basic everyday needs are pre-installed.

Known issues:

  • Text prediction for non-English languages is not working.
  • Discover might not want to update packages.
  • Many translations are still missing.
  • Suspend seems to be breaking the lockscreen, requiring a reboot.
  • Discover seems to be crashing if using a locale other than American English.
  • Customizations might not last through reboots.
  • Krecorder seems to segfault on Pinephone.
  • Night Color is buggy on PinePhone.
  • Dialer does not properly fullscreen if locale is other than American English.

Download:

Can be downloaded on our website at https://manjaro.org or with the links below:

Device PlaMo
PinePhone (Pro) Beta 14
PinePhone (Pro) Development

About the device:
PinePhone:
Perhaps you’re in a line of work where security is a must, or a hard-core Linux enthusiast, or perhaps you’ve just got enough of Android and iOS and you’re ready for something else – the PinePhone may be the next Phone for you. Powered by the same Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit SOC used in our popular PINE A64 Single Board Computer, the PinePhone runs mainline Linux as well as anything else you’ll get it to run.

The purpose of the PinePhone isn’t only to deliver a functioning Linux phone to end-users, but also to actively create a market for such a device, as well as to support existing and well established Linux-on-Phone projects. All major Linux Phone-oriented projects, as well as other FOSS OS’, are represented on the PinePhone and developers work together on our platform to bring support this this community driven device.

PinePhone Pro:
The Pinephone Pro is all you love about the PinePhone, except with better specifications. It has a 6-Core RK3399S SoC and 4 GB RAM, which is a huge upgrade compared to the regular Pinephones Allwinner A64 and 2/3 GB of RAM.
More information can be found on the Pine64 PinePhone Pro page.


How to install:

Download the image/xz file from the download location. Verify that the download completed successfully.

After that, install Etcher (sudo pacman -S etcher if on Manjaro) and burn the to an SD card (8 GB or larger).

The PinePhone (Pro) should recognize the SD card as a bootable device and boot from it.


Donate!

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.


Bugtracker

If you face issues with this editon, please open a new issue on our bug-tracker

1 Like

Thanks Strit,
i took this opportunity to reflash my pinephone to rid myself of self inflicted screen scaling issues.
I had some wayland errors on first boot but after that everything was ok.

I had to use the git link as Manjaro Downloads still points at beta13.

Thanks. Fixed.

I am curious about the issue with the modem being disabled on boot not being listed as known. This is a rather serious and quite long-standing (over a year now I think) issue.

Or was this fixed with a re-flash? I am still running the Beta Edition image with simply all updates applied.

I can’t replicate this. If the SIM is inserted correctly, it always shows up for me. So it’s not a general known issue.

Strange. I have to enabled it after every boot. Sometimes I have to reboot it several times and do that until it actually works. Even though it shows “enabled” it might not be working. After I got it working it will keep working until I have to reboot (which is basically daily because of the issue with the lock screen no longer taking input). In earlier builds (several months ago) after enabling the modem I had to enter my SIM again.

This only started like a year ago. It was working fine with the initial Beta Edition and only showed up after I had the phone for quite a while.

On every reboot I am asked to enter my SIM but that only unlocks the modem and does not enable it.

I was not the only one to have this issue. I got more context about this, as well as the command to enable the modem, with from other users. But I can’t find the post anymore. Maybe I am remembering wrong and just read the post and did not participate.

I only found the report by another user which I commented on: Modem not showing up
Here’s another user with that problem: Calling/texting (sms) with Pinephone Pro

You might have to put in the PIN each reboot, yes. Having it enabled is done each time for me.

Some more information on my issue:

Information is via mmcli -m any.

After booting the phone before entering any PIN:

  Status   |                    lock: sim-pin
           |          unlock retries: sim-pin (3), sim-puk (10), sim-pin2 (3), sim-puk2 (10)
           |                   state: locked
           |             power state: on

The modem is not available for a very brief time after you entered your PIN: error: couldn't find modem.

When it works again and you get:

  Status   |                    lock: sim-pin2
           |          unlock retries: sim-pin (3), sim-puk (10), sim-pin2 (3), sim-puk2 (10)
           |                   state: disabled
           |             power state: on

After running sudo mmcli -m any -e:

  Status   |                    lock: sim-pin2
           |          unlock retries: sim-pin (3), sim-puk (10), sim-pin2 (3), sim-puk2 (10)
           |                   state: registered
           |             power state: on
           |             access tech: lte
           |          signal quality: 62% (recent)

In this state it is working (i.e. able to receive texts).

I am curious about the sim-pin2 lock. What is that?

I will try to fetch the state the next time it not working even though it is enabled.

Is there any other log I could potentially get some info for this?

The modem is also disabled and not re-enabled when the system was suspended (I accidentally left off the power cable so the system went low on battery).

Updated my PP yesterday but had many crashes - clocked RAM down from 528 MHz to 492 MHz and the clock speed related crashes are gone.

Is it a bug when the wifi goes into the suspend mode while powerstrip is conected?

This is annoying when I want to work with ssh/ansible on my pinephone pro.

It is a missing feature of the mobile powersaving KCM (kde configuration module / System Settings module). You can bring up the desktop dialog with kcmshell5 powerdevilprofilesconfig, and there you can set less aggressive power management when on AC power (well, what it thinks is AC – any USB power source will be considered “on AC”, even a power bank, which is IMHO a feature).

Note that there is no way to suspend the CPU without suspending WiFi, so if you need the WiFi to stay up, you need to disable suspending altogether when plugged to AC (which is how I have set up my PinePhone).

I have discovered that when I wish down the menu there ist a “Caffeine” button. When I push this button then I I can do the maintenance window with ansible etc

maybe some of you know who this can be done on a cli way?

this update breaks all kinds of dependencies so it will not install with pamac, discover, or pacman. Any ideas on how to manage that?

latest plasma mobile does not update due to various dependendy problem. After installing RC 3 I followed this link Pinephone doesn't boot after latest upgrade - #2 by Darksky and the phone worked since (without DAV syncing). But the recent update is not installing here.

Hey Strit, I’m new to the forums but I have been working with Pinephone beta edition for some time now. I am excited about the device and the grass roots wish list built into the product. What I’m wondering about right now tho; where is the Beta 16 thread at? We need to be reporting and talking on that.

1 Like

Beta 16 for Plasma Mobile is the best performing release for Pinephone so far in my experience. I tested on SD and worked so well, I subsequently flashed to eMMC and it’s even better. This is totally subjective but it seems even more stable on eMMC.

The only drawback I have seen is suspension. When the phone goes into suspend, there seem to be various problems, however this has been less of a problem while flashed to eMMC. Remediation of the issue can be done by activating ‘caffeine’. I have left the phone on all day, screen went blank, hit power button, and it came back with no problem.

On doing hdmi display testing I noticed that there was no sound. After some command line probing, I saw that there was a very good reason for this. “Note Device 4” below in output of “inxi -b --usb”:

System:
  Host: manjaro-arm Kernel: 6.4.16-1-MANJARO-ARM arch: aarch64 bits: 64 Console: pty pts/1
    Distro: Manjaro ARM
Machine:
  Type: ARM System: Pine64 PinePhone (1.2) details: N/A serial: 8a8e18f54402f7fe
Battery:
  ID-1: axp20x-battery charge: 49% condition: N/A/8.2 Wh
CPU:
  Info: quad core Model N/A [MCP] speed (MHz): avg: 648 min/max: 648/1152
Graphics:
  Device-1: sun50i-a64-mali driver: lima v: kernel
  Device-2: sun50i-a64-dw-hdmi driver: sun8i_dw_hdmi v: N/A
  Device-3: sun50i-a64-display-engine driver: sun4i_drm v: N/A
  Device-4: sun9i-a80-hdmi-audio driver: N/A
  Display: server: Xorg v: 1.21.1.10 with: Xwayland v: 23.2.3 driver: X: loaded: modesetting
    dri: sun4i-drm gpu: lima,sun8i_dw_hdmi,sun4i_drm tty: 126x71
  API: OpenGL Message: GL data unavailable in console, glxinfo missing.
Network:
  Device-1: mmc-pwrseq-simple driver: pwrseq_simple
  Device-2: sun50i-a64-emac driver: N/A
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 28.91 GiB used: 4.76 GiB (16.5%)
USB:
  Hub-1: 1-0:1 info: full speed or root hub ports: 1 rev: 2.0
  Hub-2: 2-0:1 info: full speed or root hub ports: 1 rev: 2.0
  Device-1: 2-1:2 info: Quectel Wireless Solutions EC25 LTE modem type: vendor specific
    rev: 2.0
  Hub-3: 3-0:1 info: full speed or root hub ports: 1 rev: 1.1
  Hub-4: 4-0:1 info: full speed or root hub ports: 1 rev: 1.1
Info:
  Processes: 174 Uptime: 48m Memory: total: 3 GiB available: 2.92 GiB used: 1.01 GiB (34.4%)
  Init: systemd Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.31

So basically, we have visual function to hdmi but no hdmi audio driver to push sound. Some suggestions to remediate this would be welcome; such as, do we have a “sun9i-a80-hdmi-audio” hardware driver?


Moderator edit: In the future, please use proper formatting: [HowTo] Post command output and file content as formatted text

There is this driver: 1016-ASOC-sun9i-hdmi-audio-Initial-implementation.patch · main · manjaro-arm / packages / core / linux-opi · GitLab – if this still has not made it into megi’s tree, I guess this patch should also be added to linux-pinephone.

Try Beta 16.

Bear in mind that Strit has not created a plasma mobile forum entry for Beta 16 yet, so as of right now (1/14/24) we cannot report to a Beta 16 forum except for individual entries.

Kevin, I want to thank you because although you don’t know it you have already helped me out two times before in the last 2 days. One was on kwallet deactivation, another was on powerdevilprofilesconfig to avoid suspension, and now an hdmi driver for pinephone. Thank you three times and I owe you.

Sorry, I forgot to mention help with wifi; “kcmshell5 networkmanagement” to fix getting around Pam integration and keep wifi password stored. That’s four; so thanks four times and I owe you.