Manjaro ARM Beta28 with Phosh (PinePhone / PinePhonePro)

ARM Releases
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Manjaro ARM Beta28 of Phosh for PinePhone!

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

image

Those images run the 6.0 kernel from Megi.

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 (Pinephone only)

Changes since Beta27

  • We updated the kernel to 6.0.3
    • V4L2 apparently doesn’t have as strict backwards compatibility guarantees, and mainline changed the media graph for Rockchip ISPs, hence Megapixels support on PPP for cameras doesn’t work anymore.
    • Those who still want to use Megapixels can downgrade the kernel to 5.19 series
  • Gnome-Calls got updated to 43.0 including a fix to not autostart into UI
  • Gnome got updated to 43
    • initial setup might not be as adaptive as the patched GTK3 version was before
  • Squeekboard is now at 1.20.0
  • libcall-ui 0.0.5 includes the new round design
  • Pipewire got updated to 0.3.59
  • gstreamer is now at 1.20.4
  • modemmanager got renewed to 1.18.12
  • alsa got updated to 1.2.8
  • Chatty is now at 0.7.0-rc1
    • you may want to install mmsd-tng to add MMS support. APN needs to be manually configured
  • eg25-manager got updated to 0.4.6
    • now respects driver rules
  • Firefox is now at 106.0.3
  • modemmanager got renewed to 1.20.0
  • networkmanager is now at 1.40.2
  • Pamac and libpamac got updated to support Gnome 43

A detailed list of package changes can be found here.

Currently broken:

  • GPS may not work as it should

Known issues

  • During a Call the Mic can’t be muted on Pinephone and PinephonePro
  • 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 Beta28
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 Beta29 here

  • Beta28 (2022-11-24) Download
    • based on stable branch
  • Dev (2022-12-04) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Pipewire got updated to 0.3.61
    • Firefox is now at 107.0.1
    • Bluez got renewed to 5.66
    • Chatty is at 0.7.0rc3
    • Some Gnome packages got updated to 43.2
    • Mesa is at 22.2.4
    • Phosh-Antispam got updated to 3.0
    • Systemd is at 252.2
    • vvmplayer got renewed to 2.0
    • Megapixels works again with PPP cameras
  • Dev (2022-12-07) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel is now at 6.1.0-rc8
    • Chatty is at 0.7.0rc4
    • Squeekboard got more fixes added
    • Megapixels config got adopted to support 6.1 kernel series
  • Dev (2022-12-15) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel is now at 6.1.0
    • Gnome-Shell and Mutter got renewed to 43.2
    • Systemd is at 252.3
    • Firefox is renewed to 108.0
  • Dev (2023-01-05) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel is now at 6.1.2
    • We ship now the normal Megapixels also to the Pinephone Pro as 1.6.0 includes all base patches to allow to apply needed PPP patch-set on top.
    • callaudiod is at 0.1.6
    • Firefox is renewed to 108.0.1
    • mesa got refreshed to 22.3.2
    • phosh is at 0.23.0 and phosh-mobile-settings at 0.23.1
    • pipewire got renewed to 0.3.63
    • Systemd is at 252.4
    • xorg-server got updated to 21.1.6
  • Dev (2023-02-11) Download
    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel is now at 6.1.9
    • callaudiod is at 0.1.7
    • Firefox is renewed to 109.0.1
    • phosh is at 0.24.0 and phosh-mobile-settings at 0.24.0
    • pipewire got renewed to 0.3.65
    • Systemd is at 252.5
    • xorg-server got updated to 21.1.7
    • Several Gnome packages got renewed, including Calls 43.3
3 Likes
2

VERY solid release, glad to see the annoying squeekboard loss of arrow keys unless “terminal” is selected as input language -bug gone.

The only issue is the longstanding one that has been present for more than 10 releases, after every boot i need to disable and enable mobile data to get it working, before that it shows ! in front of the signal bar and the arrows with x indicating disconnected data. Curiously if i let the phone go to deep sleep, it will correctly enable the mobile data when waking up.

3

I’ve been postponing using my Pinephone every day until MMS was working. Thanks to the helpful folks here I have learned that

  • Chatty is now at 0.7.0-rc1
    • you may want to install mmsd-tng to add MMS support. APN needs to be manually configured

I have been hesitating because I don’t know what “APN needs to be manually configured” means or how long it is likely to take. Any clues?

4

you configure it from chatty mms settings. If your operator uses different apn for mms and mobile data, you need to choose which one to use, both cannot be active at same time for now. A helper to automate switching between these exists. Alaraajavamma / APN + MMS handler · GitLab

1 Like
5

Thanks @varikonniemi for exactly the information I needed to decide what to do. It appears that my carrier, T-Mobile, uses different APNs for mms (epc.tmobile.com) and mobile data (fast.t-mobile.com), so I would need to us the switcher. Based on how I use my phone, that would be inconvenient for me, so I will resume waiting until I can use mobile data and MMS at the same time.

7

Issue for me is that if someone else decide to send me MMS (so I am not the one who is “using it”) it will still be a problem because the modem becomes blocked and you practically cannot make calls, send sms messages, or use the internet until the modem is cleaned.

One MMS does not jam modem but in my experience five will. Sometimes even two.

You can clean it without my scripts with AT commands or trough modem manager but what if the MMS message contains something important? I have noticed that some Android phones does not work correctly and they change long SMS messages to MMS - so you end up in that situation even without any attachments.

And yes, again solid release good job :slight_smile:

8

Why is the sms app called chats in the about page, but chatty in the repository? This is confusing.

9

This is a GNOME thing that Phosh has unfortunately partially inherited. A lot of GNOME applications have two names, an internal one and a generic one that is displayed to users (sometimes prefixed with GNOME for disambiguation). E.g., what is internally “Epiphany” is branded as “Web” or “GNOME Web”.

2 Likes
10

update: issue seems to be with the SIM/carrier. Starting with a fresh install without SIM, all is well. When SIM is added/inserted, things break…

Working on a fresh install of beta28, and settings keep crashing for me.
Anyone else have this issue or any suggestions/hints?

Hardware switches for modem and wifi still turned off, initial setup done (language&keyboard), changing manjaro and root passwords, then starting to change settings, initially all looks great. After a couple settings are changed, the settings become unresponsive but the window can eventually be closed.

When attempting to reopen, it comes up unresponsive before crashing soon after. All repeated twice from image written to SD card, same result. Thanks!

11

Hi, I have an issue that persist since the last release with arch-phosh and manjaro phosh where if you go to the color setting in the gnome control center, it fails and won’t open ever again. I have created an issue there. Gnome control center stop working after using the color setting menu (#871) · Issues · World / Phosh / phosh · GitLab

Avoid going in the color setting if you don’t want gnome control setting to die :stuck_out_tongue: .
Would be glad if someone could confirm the bug (try it with a fresh image loaded on ssd to confirm)

12

Issue was fixed a month ago by the look of it… so probably in the next stable release. If you come accros this problem you can launch with gnome-control-center mouse to change the menu page has a workaround.

13

Happy New Year all,
just to confirm, I should not need the mmsd-tng package for regular sms to work, correct?

the carrier has been trying all kinds of “fixes” on the back end but I can still only send and not receive sms. Instead, their “fixes” alter my menus and the settings on my data connection, and all without OS notification or consent/confirmation. This has happened before I switched to PinePhone, and now with PinePhone it is the second time, each on a different network.

If the attraction of this OS/device supposedly is better control over ones personal device settings, then a carrier should not be able to change device settings from their backend via SIM resets or the like. At the minimum, there should be a notification by the OS about any changes.

To be clear, this is not a complaint against the dev’s working hard on this project – I understand we’re in beta here, and I’ve enjoyed the ride since beta4. Just checking, is it a goal of this group to eventually achieve transparency in device settings? Is there a plan?

14

Happy new year!

I can try to answer to your messages.
Short story: SMS does not need mmsd-tng - in general.
Longer story: Some old android phones and also IPhones turn long SMS messages to MMS. This is not needed in 2023* (*What Android and Apple is doing) but if you want to receive those messages you need to have mmsd-tng and correct APN. Or messages with attachment. What happens if you just ignore these? Your modem might get jammed and you can’t do anything with it before you clean it (by deleting messages or receiving them).

For the other questions:
If you are using carriers network you have to live with fact that carrier is the boss :slight_smile: . I mean they can’t directly change anything what they want but if you want to use their network they can decide what you need to have to make it work.

So carriers can’t make any changes to Pinephone but they can most definitely determine with which settings your phone is using the network.

15

Thank you for the detailed reply, appreciate it :slight_smile:
Seems like I have no issue with the modem because sending sms works fine.

If I understand you correctly, you say that the carrier/reseller does not make physical changes to the Pinephone device. But they have been and are most certainly changing my connection settings and menus via SIM card resets, and the OS is giving no notification or warning about it. This is not new and not a one-off event. It has happened now in three different incidences under one reseller, and those three incidences include two carriers and two Pinephone devices.

It happened beforehand with regular phones and I expected this to be different on Pinphones. If carrier is king, as you say, then this means I can do nothing about them changing my settings. This is disappointing. If nothing can be done about this, then it would be nice to at least have notifications about this by the OS. I hope someone will find this issue worth exploring because it is real.

17

The latest stable update made firefox stop scrolling in vertical mode. By accident i noticed that scrolling still works when the phone is turned into horizontal mode with screen rotation on. I had the same happen few days before the stable update when i switched to unstable branch doing some testing related to cpuidle (reinstalled beta28 since).

18

I’ve to check which build of the phosh-dev builds would reflect the current stable branch packages and update the changelog as needed. firefox I barly test these days. CPUIDLE we have to see what is missing. I asked around, but had no feedback yet regarding uboot nor kernel.

19

If there is not enough manpower to test firefox, maybe it would be better to drop the manjaro custom configuration and just ship vanilla as the custom config might be a source of problems?

20

You can remove mobile-config-firefox and then everything works (expect you don’t have those mobile-config things :D).
I actually like it better like this.

21

There is a reason that some distributions use firefox-esr on the Pinephone … The config is maintained here: Tags · postmarketOS / mobile-config-firefox · GitLab. Is that your issue? touch does not work after firefox 108 unless in landscape (#48) · Issues · postmarketOS / mobile-config-firefox · GitLab

22

that is the issue, but if you mean if that’s me reporting it, then no.