Manjaro ARM Beta 20 with Phosh (PinePhone / PinephonePro)

Love the work you guys are doing I have finally made the switch to pinephone as my daily driver thanks to the MMS support.

This update required me to uninstall and reinstall chatty as it was frozen whenever I opened it even after two reboots (just info for anyone else who updates from beta 19 to 20 and has that issue).

I have been dropping calls due to call waiting any idea if its a setting that can be changed (turn off call waiting)? Whenever I am on a call and someone else calls me i loose the ability to talk to the person I was on the phone with and have to hang up and call them back.

Thanks.

I’ve encountered a strange bug (not sure whether it is specific to Beta 20).
Using sudo passwd seems to invalidate the standard manjaro user password, effectively logging me out of the PinePhone.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I don’t think this should happen.
passwd works fine to change manjaro user password and sudo su then passwd correctly changes root password.

yes, it sometimes works, sometimes not. We are currently looking into Plymouth …

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Etcher was unable to write the img.xz file provided for this beta (some error about a null message) (sha1 was verified for the download).
workaround: extract and write the image manually:

dd if=Manjaro-ARM-phosh-pinephone-beta20.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress

From a fresh install of beta 20, I had to run the following in order to update and install apps (otherwise it would complain about corrupt packages):

sudo rm -r /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
sudo pacman-key --init
sudo pacman-key --populate

Other than that, haven’t run into any issues. Very snappy compared to an updated install of beta 17.

I noticed the etcher failure on both phosh beta 20 and plasma beta 9. But it happens at the end of verification phase, and the images still flash successfully.

I also flashed Beta 20 recently, directly to eMMC (I’ve been using jumpdrive for flashing). A small glitch I noticed so far: the tweaks option to limit battery charging does not appear to work. (I can’t comment on telephony & BT yet.) Otherwise it runs great, very snappy indeed!

(PPP) Audio works good. All applications work just as good as with the regular Pinephone, but much more responsive :smiley: The biggest issue so far is that the phone doesn’t seem to wake up from deep-sleep yet, so I have to reboot each time I try to wake up the phone when it’s off the charger. Also, did anyone check Marble maps recently? Quite impressive smooth map experience; too bad there is still a glitch in the map rendering.

I know it’s not advised to flash to emmc (yet), but the bootloader also seems to supports booting from SD card recently? How does this work? Using the volume buttons? If that’s the case, did anyone verify if there is an easy ‘plan-b’? I found Erasing the eMMC | Pinephone Pro, which suggests that the emmc boot can be disabled manually, in case of booting issues.

One small thing; would it be possible to add Firefox about:config options by default? After each flash I tend to set:

webgl.force-enabled > true
gfx.webrender.all > true
gfx.webrender.compositor > true
gfx.webrender.compositor.force-enabled > true
layers.acceleration.force-enabled > true

This enables webgl1/2 and seems to improve performance, although webrender support still seems to be blocked by 1730936 - DMFBuf does not work on Pinebook Pro/Rockchip RK3399

uboot 2021.01-rc3 is also able to be flashed to eMMC. It will allow to boot from SD if that is given. The only issue is, if you fail to flash to eMMC properly you might have a problem as the hardware boot order is always eMMC first. So how does it boot from SD then? Well, we always boot from eMMC, then search if SD has another valid uboot and boot that, if not continue to boot from eMMC.

Thanks for the clarification. I may give it a try. It seems the worse thing that could happen in case of a flashing problem is that I need to manually short a circuit on the board, in order to disable the emmc.

Happy New Year everyone!

Can we clarify this, please? AFAIK the hardware boot order is SD first.[1]

In my case: I actually borked the eMMC image a while ago with an update. it did not boot anymore from eMMC only. Yet, it was simply a matter of a working bootloader/jumpdrive on the SD card to flash the new beta.
[1] PinePhone Installation Instructions - PINE64

Boot order on the PinePhone: SD, eMMC
Boot order on the PinePhonePro: SPI (not present), eMMC, SD

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Hopefully this is the right place to post this
I can’t listen to something for more than 10 minutes before it disconnects. What can I check for this?

loving the progress in functionality and fewer crashes!
beta20 seems a good bit slower to bring up programs compared to beta17 though.

is anbox ever coming back?
if I am missing anything, can someone please point me to how to get anbox working again? The last time I had it working was somewhere around beta9-beta11.

Thanks!

It’s been replaced by Waydroid. There are two sets of instructions on the forums. I can’t recall which you need now, but the two are:

sudo pacman -Syu waydroid waydroid-image
sudo waydroid init -f
sudo systemctl enable waydroid-container --now

or

*Remember, Waydroid only works on wayland!*

* Install `waydroid-image` and all it’s dependencies.
* Enable the service with `sudo systemctl enable waydroid-container`.
* Run `pkexec setup-waydroid` as root user
* Reboot.
* You should now be able to launch Waydroid. The first launch takes a while.

If you can’t access the net in Waydroid:

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Thanks for the tip. I found chatty to be sluggish, but not frozen when I upgraded from beta 18 to beta 20. After reinstallation, it works as well as it did before.

Is there a way to disable the bootsplash other than removing the package? I packaged TTYescape and it works if you remove the bootsplash.

Hey no worries mao, glad to help.

Is anyone else having the call waiting issue? When on a call and another comes in it stays connected but you cant hear or be heard by the other person until you hang up and call back.

Took some time off my PinePhone since the screen got messed up, waiting on the replacement (which hopefully will not get messed up after just a year like the original panel did). I really love seeing that the software is keep being improved.

@philm why is there no more dark theme configured? the bright colors are burning my eyes.
I personally liked the dark theme on the PinePhone.

I am sure I am not alone on the dark theme preference :slight_smile:

Any way to include a toggle under “Setting” to toggle bright / dark theme?

  • and a small possible bug report for Beta 20:
    since upgrading, whenever the phone is being switched on, once reaching the phone lock screen, it is emitting those strange sounds that used to be emitted when changing from front/back cameras… “tick… tick… tick…”, the sound disappear once I unlock the device.
    (the same weird sound appear for a few seconds when switching the device off)

I’m seeing two or three issues during a call in Calls. I think the first is likely a pulse/pipewire configuration issue.

I’ve been seeing an issue with Calls for some unknown amount of time now, and it has recently “progressed” to another part of Calls. On OG PP, Manjaro Phosh, when a call connects, the call and/or mic volume are set to 0% at the start of a call, usually only one or the other (i.e., sometimes call volume is 0, sometimes mic volume is 0). The call volume is easily fixed by hitting the volume rocker. The issue with call volume has been occurring for sometime. The mic issue only started two weeks ago and I have only been able to resolve it intermittently, but usually have to reboot my phone. The only occasional fix I’ve had is to open audio settings and move the volume slider of the mic for “make a phone call” from 0 to 100%, but sometimes when this issue occurs, the mic’s volume is set to 100% according to settings.

Is this a known issue in the pulse/pipewire config?

Also, I answered a call that woke my phone from sleep. During that call, my phone kept shutting off the call roughly every 2 minutes (the set amount of time to initiate sleep). Hitting the power button restored the call and allowed the call to continue. Unlocking the device showed no active call window from which I could end the call. The solution was to hang up and for me to start a new return call, which disabled the sleeping.