Manjaro ARM Beta 16 with Phosh (PinePhone)

ARM Releases
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Manjaro ARM Beta16 of Phosh for PinePhone!

The Manjaro ARM project is proud to announce our sixteenth BETA release for the PinePhone running Phosh!

image

This image is running the 5.14 kernel from Megi, which is designed for the PinePhone.

Features:

  • Firefox uses a dedicated configuration and plays videos on Youtube pretty well
  • Camera app with access to back and front camera, including autofocus
  • Auto-Rotate function and manual rotate
  • Welcome wizard for easy setup of the device
  • We have now a working Torch in the quick-access-menu
  • Prime phone functions working, including resume from deep-sleep and free speaking
  • Recording of audio works
  • Most applications got added to scale-to-fit
  • Haptic feedback functions are given
  • Optimized keyboard layout for terminal
  • Maps working with geolocate
  • Volume buttons working
  • Sensors fully functional
  • Easy access to Bluetooth, Wlan, Rotate and Mobile functions via quick settings
  • Default branch is arm-stable. This can be changed by editing /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf
  • usage of callaudiod for better audio experience with calls
  • This image uses a Crust enabled uboot

Changes since Beta15

  • Kernel got updated to 5.14.8
  • gstreamer got renewed to 1.18.5
  • gnome-initial-setup is now at 41.0
  • kwayland got updated to 5.86.0
  • Chatty gained the connection to control mmsd-tng from the UI
  • Control-Center got updated to 40.4
  • Gnome-Software got removed and replaced by Pamac Gnome Integration
  • Mesa is now at 21.2.2
  • Phosh shows now clearly when you use your Wifi as Hotspot
  • Anbox pre-installation removed (will shrink the image from 1.36 GB to 1.09 GB)
  • PipeWire is now at 0.3.37
  • Calls got updated to 41.0
  • Firefox is at 92.0.1
  • glib2, phosh and phoc get patched to support Application Launch Splash Support
  • Firefox mobile config got renewed
  • More tweaks to the app launch splash support in Phosh
  • uboot firmware uses now a config file to save selected MHz settings
  • regular upstream package updates and cleanups

A detailed list of package changes can be found here.

Currently broken:

  • GPS may not work as it should

Known issues

  • Chatty may crash with experimental features like MMS enabled. You may disable them via gsettings set sm.puri.Chatty experimental-features false if that is the case
  • UI becomes unresponsive after a while.
  • Doing a recording may result in noisy audio savings
  • Lots of apps are still missing or are not mobile friendly yet.

Download:

Device Phosh
PinePhone Beta16
PinePhone Nightly

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.

Order

Pinephones Beta Edition are still on stock. Visit the Pine64 Store

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 should recognize the SD card as a bootable device and boot from it.

The premade users are:
User: manjaro
Password: 123456

User: root
password: root

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

Development Changelog

We will list our progress to Beta17 here

  • Beta16 (2021-09-28) Download
    • based on stable branch
  • Dev (2021-10-01) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • pipewire got updated to 0.3.38
    • chatty gained more polish and MMS settings adjustments
    • more merge requests got merged into eg25-manager
    • most Gnome applications got updated to 40.5
    • Kernel got renewed to 5.14.9
    • Mesa is now at 21.2.3
    • postmarketos-tweaks-app 0.8.0 gained more features
    • regular improvements to Phosh and Phoc
  • Dev (2021-10-03) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • small adjustments to calls and chatty
    • eg25-manager add a patch for better AT cmd handling
    • manjaro-tweaks got a workaround for a packagekit issue added
    • vvmplayer got fixed, so a profile switching on startup won’t happen
  • Dev (2021-10-07) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Calls got more SIP enhancements
    • Chatty has another set of polish for MMS
    • eg25-manager now loads also older configs without crashing
    • Firefox is now at 93.0
    • Phosh-Antispam got added
    • uboot-pinephone got restructured and simplified
    • Numberstation got added, a Gnome Authenticator clone. This generates 2fa tokens based on secrets installed. It registers as uri-handler for otpauth:// urls so they can be added from Megapixels.
    • vvmd, vvmplayer, mmsd-tng got new stable releases
  • Dev (2021-10-10) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • we added more polish to chatty, phosh and phoc
    • eg25-manager is now at 0.4.1
    • Kernel is now at 5.14.11
    • Phosh-Antispam is now disabled by default. You may want to take a look at ~/.config/gnome_calls_spam_options
  • Dev (2021-10-13) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Gnome-Calendar is now adaptive
    • we removed some unneeded scripts in our tweaks
    • uboot got updated to 2021.10-1
3 Likes
2

Apologies for silly question. Wondering if it is reco to update the modem firmware separately?

3

A most excellent update with working MMS! Keep up the great work on this. It has officially freed me of Andriod at this point

4

Everything works great but I still have this bug, and so do many others. gitlab.manjaro org/manjaro-arm/issues/pinephone/phosh/-/issues/184

The mic seems to work fine when using any app except when calling. Upon calling, the mic and audio settings change and can only be properly changed back with a reboot. This is the only issue keeping me from fully switching to my PinePhone. :frowning:
I’m new so I’m sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.
Thank you eveyone! Keep up the great work :grin: :+1:

5

For those of you like myself that still need a working Maps app before making the jump to the PinePhone as a daily driver, there is some positive news as Gnome maps is seeing some gradual progress towards being more mobile friendly.
One point mentioned in this blog update is the optimisation of touch input for touch screens with improvements to pinch to zoom and fractional scaling.
I suspect that the other GUI points that they touch on are also connected to the preparations for improvements to the mobile experience in Gnome Maps later on.

2 Likes
6

Thanks! Was wondering what was going on with the mapping applications. They dont work that well right now.

7

Yeah, that is probably the only thing that I commonly use on phones that Linux on the PinePhone doesn’t offer usable alternatives for yet.
Most of the other things like calls and messages I do through communication apps like Signal and Telegram these days anyway, so I’m not too concerned about the traditional calling and messaging solutions, as long as I have mobile data, communication should be fine.

1 Like
8

Same here. Just need it for edge cases

9

I was advised to switch from PipeWire back to PulseAudio (similar as above). I have tried to do the opposite procedure to the instructions, but without success.
As a non-privileged user I don’t have permission to do this, if I execute it as root the service doesn’t start.

[root@manjaro-arm ~]# systemctl --user status pulseaudio
â—‹ pulseaudio.service - Sound Service
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.service; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
TriggeredBy: â—‹ pulseaudio.socket
[root@manjaro-arm ~]# 
[root@manjaro-arm ~]# systemctl --user status pulseaudio.socket 
â—‹ pulseaudio.socket - Sound System
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/user/pulseaudio.socket; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
   Triggers: â—Ź pulseaudio.service
  Condition: start condition failed at Sat 2021-10-02 15:19:55 CEST; 15s ago
             └─ ConditionUser=!root was not met
     Listen: /run/user/0/pulse/native (Stream)

What is the recommended procedure? Uninstall PipeWire? (But there are dependencies on it e.g. Mutter, Telegram, …)

Updated 2021-10-04:

# systemctl --machine=manjaro@.host --user stop pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-media-session  # turn off PipeWire
# su manjaro -c "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 pw-cli info 0"  # verification
# systemctl --machine=manjaro@.host --user mask pipewire.service pipewire.socket pipewire-media-session  # make PipeWire impossible to start
# systemctl --machine=manjaro@.host list-unit-files --state=masked  # verification

BTW screenshot # su manjaro -c "XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1000 XDG_PICTURES_DIR=~/Pictures grim"

10

did you disable pipewire.service and enable pulseaudio.service ? You could also try installing pavucontrol. It usually knocks pulseaudio into a usable state when you toggle some settings in it :slight_smile: It did not have an icon for me when I installed it but, seems to work just fine when you call it from the cli

11

Yeah. I’d like to do that. But I only managed to disable pipewire.service :see_no_evil:

12

Try:

$sudo pacman -S pavucontrol
$pavucontrol

after that, the pavucontrol gui should come up and you should be able to get your audio interfaces up and running with pulseaudio and minimal effort

14

All new images run with pulseaudio. Simply download one, flash it on an SD and test.

15

An error on my part in verifying the status. It seems that pactl info can’t be accessed using ssh as opposed to pw-cli info 0. It must be invoked somewhat differently.

16

Wow just changed to unstable branch, the new icons grafics are beautiful! Things are getting better amazingly fast and even more pretty as interface! Thanks so much for the great work!

17

Flashing… :woozy_face: I consider the possibility of continuous updates to be one of the great advantages of a Linux phone, so I try to avoid fashing. I know the system isn’t that mature yet, but I’m really looking forward to it and a big thanks to everyone involved in that future :beers: | :clinking_glasses:

18

The “pinephone” tag needs to be added to to this post, please.

19

This news is important to me. I can’t find my way out of a paper bag.

1 Like
20

I have issue with download.

21

Hey @philm Just wanted to say the progress you’re making on Manjaro Phosh is just awesome! Been using it on my Manjaro community edition since the phone was first available and it’s been wonderful to see it getting more feature-rich and robust. Things were a bit wobbly between Beta 12 and 14 but the current release is working well and is really polished - you should talk to Pine64 about maybe doing another run of Manjaro phones to highlight the progress you’ve made! :+1:

2 Likes