Manjaro ARM Beta 18 with Phosh (PinePhone)

ARM Releases
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Manjaro ARM Beta18 of Phosh for PinePhone!

The Manjaro ARM project is proud to announce our eightteenth 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 Beta17

  • Kernel is now at 5.14.15.
  • Phosh is now at 0.14.0
  • Phoc got updated to 0.9.0. If you use scale-to-fit you may need to update your configs as the app-id handling had changed.
  • Calls got more SIP enhancements
  • Chatty got more enhanced with MMS support
  • feedbackd is now more flexible to load custom sound patterns
  • Mesa is now at 21.2.4
  • mmsd-tng and vvm saw new stable releases
  • Pamac 10.2.2 adds some needed AUR fixes
  • Powersupply and PostmarketOS Tweaks had some updates
  • Systemd is now at 249.5
  • pipewire got updated to 0.3.39
  • Gnome-Control-Center got updated to 41.0
  • Gnome-Calendar got some more adaptive patches added
  • Phosh-Antispam is now at 2.0 and provides a nice UI
  • 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 Beta18
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 Beta19 here

  • Beta18 (2021-11-08) Download
    • based on stable branch
  • Dev (2021-11-14) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel got updated to 5.15.2
    • eg25-manager will now break before overflow when receiving messages
    • Firefox got updated to 94.0.1
    • Most Gnome apps and tools got updated to 41
    • Pipewire is now at 0.3.40
    • Pamac got renewed to 10.3.0
    • We are using now regular rtl8723bt-firmware for Bluetooth. Please switch to that package if you lost Bluetooth support on your end.
    • Systemd is now bumped to 249.6
    • We are now shipping with the latest Xorg-Server 21.1.1 and XWayland 21.1.3
  • Dev (2021-11-29) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel got updated to 5.15.5
    • We worked on getting USB Tethering working again
    • Chatty is now at 0.5-beta
    • We had the regular ICU 70.1 rebuilds
    • eg25-manager supports now also the Pinephone Pro
    • Firefox is now at 94.0.2
    • We fixed some issues with gnome-keyring
    • megapixels got updated to 1.4.2
    • mesa is at 21.2.5
    • ModemManager got updated to 1.18.4
    • Phosh got a lot of polish
    • We added some more fixes to Squeekboard
    • Systemd is now at 249.7
3 Likes
2

Hey @philm, thanks for another beta!

Short question: in the development changelog under the Dev (2021-11-14) entry, what does this mean exactly? More specifically, what are the consequences of it?

eg25-manager will now break before overflow when receiving messages

Thanks! :slight_smile:

3

Latest unstable update made login screen function worse. Previously it only accepted numbers as input from external keyboard, but now it accepts other keys. This means that when you try to wake up the phone and since it takes many keypresses to have the bluetooth active and connect, they get fed in as password. So now you need to backspace them away before entering the pin.

As long as you don’t allow OSK text input to make alphanumeric passwords viable, this is a regression in usability with external keyboard.

4

I didn’t had time yet to look at latest updates in unstable branch. There is some progress to also allow normal passwords in near future. Since we don’t yet target endusers it is common that we ship half-baked software for developers to test. You can follow the process here.

1 Like
5

good to see OSK input being worked on and this change seems logically connected to that work. No problem as long as it does not find it’s way to stable update in this state.

6

I think that long term, I’d probably appreciate a mix of letters and numbers on my phone password.
Because when convergence is practical enough to use your phone as a PC on the go, I’d rather a more secure password and not just a pin number.
And given the phone will likely see fingerprint login support by then, it’s not like the strong passwords would be a pain outside of convergence mode as your fingerprint will be usable in phone mode anyway.

For now while the performance isn’t quite there to daily drive convergence mode, I guess that everything needs to be seen with a Mobile first mindset, but I think that when the hardware is fast enough for convergence, you will see a rising trend in people looking for desktop specific features that aren’t strictly what you would expect on a phone and options to change the way interactions are done in both device states.

It will be great when we reach a point where the only major UX worries are things like, having the system to understand the difference between phone displays and desktop displays, so that you could have things like unique lists of favourite apps in both states, as some folks may want something that needs the screen real-estate like Davinci-Resolve only on their desktop screens favourites list, but not on their mobile favourites list, and a navigation app only on their mobile screen favourites.

7

you guys going to fix the issue where we need to power cycle the phone to get cellular working again after it stays on for a while?

8

If you mean calls and not mobile data, then it can be fixed by installing open modem firmware. It still though has an issue of data dropping out and needing reboot. Probably when previously the whole modem would fall, with the open firmware only data falls.

9

I would like to bring this topic to anybodies attention, if you would like to test it as well/give your opinion:
Pinephone Discussion: using systemd-resolved as dns backend

Kind regards,

Jasper

10

If Manjaro mobile removes Pacman, I don’t really see any advantage of Manjaro over others.
Pacman is the ONLY reason I choose Manjaro for PinePhone over the alternatives.

1 Like
11

There are two user groups:

  • users who want a solid system similar to Android/iOS based on open-source
  • Linux users to have a mobile PC in their pocket with phone functionality

The first group would be happy to have a system they can’t break, might be restricted, and apps from an app store like flathub. The later most likely want native Linux packages thru a package manager. As we proceed we will have a classic image with pacman and also will focus on a distribution platform, which suits Linux on Mobile better. This we will do closely with Collabora and KDE.

12

Rather than removing the stuff, I think it would be more logical to hide it under developer settings similar to how certain things are hidden in Android.
So those that want a n00b friendly environment out of the box can get it, but those that want extra control can go into the about screen, tap the Manjaro logo a few times and unlock access to tools like Terminal and enable additional features that are more familiar to Linux users.

One of the reasons I want to see Linux mobile gain momentum over Android/iOS is because I want to put more control in the users hands.

UX is very important and should NEVER be ignored, but if Linux mobile compromises on user control, then it no longer offers much advantage over Android/iOS overall. Well… not enough to justify giving up everything on those platforms and make the compromises required to switch to a new platform.

Giving up an array of apps that you’ve become familiar with, or even paid for may be justifiable, if in return you gain MUCH more control over your digital life, but making those sacrifices for not much more than a new UI with a few different apps is probably not going to sell the idea of Linux mobile to people.

1 Like
13

Make the stability through opensuse -like bootloader-based rollback of btrfs snapshots in case of trouble. It truly feels weird to split manjaro into two ecosystems desktop vs. mobile

1 Like
14

Thanks for the great work. Calls and SMS have been so reliable that I know I am close to making this my daily driver. Firefox has been working perfectly as well (I am posting from my pinephone right now). I would love to see Pithos and Cozy work reliably, but those are not show stoppers for me. When I get some time over the holidays I may see if those are things I can fix myself.

BTW, Foliate works perfectly as well. You may want to consider including so everyone can have a good ereader.

Thanks again

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