Manjaro ARM Beta3 for PineTab

ARM Releases
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The Manjaro ARM project is proud to announce the third beta for the PineTab!

IMG_20210601_133843
IMG_20210601_1338431920×1080 137 KB

This image uses kernel mainline kernel 5.12.

Since our last developer release in March, there has been quite a lot of improvements.
These images are based on the arm-testing branch.

Known issues

All Editions

  • Megapixels does not launch, can’t find pine64,pinetab-early-adopter.ini file.
  • Wakeup from standby somtimes takes more than one press of the power button.
  • Sometimes the screen does not want to turn on on boot. A workaround is to boot a working image from eMMC, put in the SD card and then reboot (not shutdown and boot).
  • Volume buttons does not seem to work.

Downloads

Device Phosh Plasma Mobile
PineTab (Early Adopter version) Beta3 Beta3

About the device

PineTab:
The PINETAB is similar in both form, function and underlying ARM64 architecture to the original 11.6″ PINEBOOK. It is powered by the same Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor used in our popular PINE A64 Single Board Computer. The optional keyboard and trackpad – which doubles-up as a screen cover – effectively converts the PineTab into a petite on-the-go laptop with a touch screen functionality. It runs numerous mainline Linux distributions as well as *BSDs and Android.

As a new open source platform, the PineTab development is an ongoing process and represents a great opportunity to get involved with computing on a different level, to customise and personalise the portable computer experience, to understand what is going on beneath the surface.

Order

The PineTab is currently out of stock in the Pine64 Store, but it will be back soon.
Currently UBPorts is the default OS on the PineTab. But you can flash Manjaro ARM to an SD card or directly to the internal eMMC and it will boot that.

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) or Manjaro ARM Flasher (sudo pacman -S manjaro-arm-flasher if you are on Manjaro ARM) and burn the image to an SD card (8 GB or larger).
The PineTab should recognize the SD card as a bootable device and boot from it.

These images are also available through the Manjaro ARM Flasher!

The preconfigured users on Phosh are:
User: manjaro
Password: 123456

User: root
password: root

The Plasma Mobile edition uses Pico Wizard as it’s First Run setup tool.

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.

1 Like
2

I managed to get the auto-rotate to work on the plasma mobile image:

  1. Add the “Display Configuration” widget by doing a long press on the wallpaper, “add widgets” and select “Display Configuration”.
  2. Press on the “Advanced Display Settings” button on the newly created widget.
  3. Select the “Automatic” radio button next to “Orientation:” and uncheck the “Only when in tablet mode.” box.

Perhaps the auto-rotate doesn’t work because it wrongly assume it is in convergence mode?

2 Likes
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I was originally enabling it through installing and using the systemsettings application. Autorotate would also work using that method as soon as you disabled “Only when in tablet mode”.

4

So it seems like Kwin does not know that the PineTab is a tablet… Interesting.

5

Today,

  1. Install beta3 plasma-mobile to emmc, via jumpdrive 0.8.
    Result: #wontboot

  2. Install to uSD card.
    Result: #wontboot

  3. Install beta2 plasma-mobile back to SD card (have had previous success.)
    Result: Boots! but horridly slow, probably due to SD card i/o r/w speeds. It’s still faster than Mobian-phosh running on emmc …

  4. After manjaro-arm-installer (on SD card beta2 image) failed to find a PineTab image (to install to emmc) …

  5. Got brave and, via jumpdrive, installed beta2 to emmc.
    Result: Boots! & a quick (well…) pacman -Syu (Gaaawd! Discover is awful!) later, I should be up to date with beta3 (?) … and it still boots!

In all wontboot cases, condition is assumed, based on following observations: No heat detected from cpu/ram. No activity on screen. No characteristic whisk-click of SD card activity as heard from previous SD card OS installs.

Note: Also tried PineTab images for manjaro-arm-installer from my Manjaro amd64 laptop. No PineTab images to be found. Also from the beta2 running SD card image. No PineTab images to be found.

6

Frank S tried to boot nemomobile images for pinetab, but it didn’t boot either. I believe, we are using the same parts of arm-profiles and manjaro-arm-tools as manjaro/phosh or manjaro/plasma does.

Franks attached following log:

U-Boot SPL 2021.10-1 (Oct 10 2021 - 17:53:00 +0000)
DRAM: 2048 MiB
Trying to boot from MMC1
NOTICE:  BL31: v2.5(debug):
NOTICE:  BL31: Built : 17:53:00, Oct 10 2021
NOTICE:  BL31: Detected Allwinner A64/H64/R18 SoC (1689)
NOTICE:  BL31: Found U-Boot DTB at 0x4097b08, model: SoPine with baseboard
INFO:    ARM GICv2 driver initialized
INFO:    Configuring SPC Controller
INFO:    PMIC: Probing AXP803 on RSB
INFO:    PMIC: dcdc1 voltage: 3.300V
INFO:    PMIC: dcdc5 voltage: 1.200V
INFO:    PMIC: dcdc6 voltage: 1.100V
INFO:    PMIC: dldo1 voltage: 3.300V
INFO:    PMIC: dldo2 voltage: 3.300V
INFO:    PMIC: dldo4 voltage: 3.300V
INFO:    PMIC: fldo1 voltage: 1.200V
INFO:    PMIC: Enabling DC SW
INFO:    BL31: Platform setup done
INFO:    BL31: Initializing runtime services
INFO:    BL31: cortex_a53: CPU workaround for 843419 was applied
INFO:    BL31: cortex_a53: CPU workaround for 855873 was applied
INFO:    BL31: cortex_a53: CPU workaround for 1530924 was applied
INFO:    PSCI: Suspend is unavailable
INFO:    BL31: Preparing for EL3 exit to normal world
INFO:    Entry point address = 0x4a000000
INFO:    SPSR = 0x3c9


U-Boot 2021.10-1 (Oct 10 2021 - 17:53:00 +0000) Manjaro ARM

CPU:   Allwinner A64 (SUN50I)
Model: SoPine with baseboard
DRAM:  2 GiB
MMC:   mmc@1c0f000: 0, mmc@1c11000: 1
Loading Environment from FAT... MMC: no card present
In:    serial
Out:   serial
Err:   serial
Net:   phy interface8
Could not get PHY for ethernet@1c30000: addr 1
No ethernet found.

starting USB...
Bus usb@1c1a000: USB EHCI 1.00
Bus usb@1c1a400: USB OHCI 1.0
Bus usb@1c1b000: USB EHCI 1.00
Bus usb@1c1b400: USB OHCI 1.0
scanning bus usb@1c1a000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus usb@1c1a400 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus usb@1c1b000 for devices... 2 USB Device(s) found
scanning bus usb@1c1b400 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
       scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
MMC: no card present

He also mentioned that it is using wrong device tree. It should look like

NOTICE:  BL31: Found U-Boot DTB at 0x4065598, model: PineTab

He used uboot from mobian and attached his output: SUSE Paste

I guess that it could be related to change in naming of device tree.

Unfortunately, I am not able to do any research my self because I don’t have the device.