Manjaro ARM Beta7 with Plasma-Mobile (PinePhone)

ARM Releases
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We are happy to present our seventh Beta Release of the Manjaro Plasma-Mobile edition for the PinePhone:

PlaMo_beta7 (3)
PlaMo_beta7 (3)1920Ă—1080 133 KB

This image includes

  • Kernel 5.13.14 optimized for the Pinephone, which recently had some great improvements in regards of battery life,
  • Frameworks 5.85
  • Plasma 5.22.5
  • Plasma-Mobile apps, which are now bundled as Plamo Gear 21.08
  • Maui Apps 2.0 and
  • Camera app Megapixels 1.2.0 with great improvements in responsiveness,
  • Pipewire 0.3.34,
  • Appimagelauncher 2.2.0 and
  • our Pico-Wizard for easy initial setup at first launch

Over the last months Plasma-Mobile has made a lot of remarkable progress in regards of graphical appearance with smooth transitions and auto-rotate. Apps are now launching faster, too.
The drop-down menu provides Settings, Flashlight, a Screenshot function and more.
With Plamo Gear and the Maui Apps applications for all typical everyday needs are pre-installed.

Known issues:

  • keyboard in pico-wizard closes frequently and needs to be re-opened by tapping input fields again
  • modem stability is still not very good. This should be improved significantly in the near future by transitioning to support of modemmanager
  • text prediction is currently only available for English.
  • many translations are still missing.

Download:

Device PlaMo
PinePhone Beta7
PinePhone Development

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.

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

4 Likes
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nice and pipewire finaly now still hoping modemmanager replaces ofono in plasma mobile so i can use my contracted sim on plamo

1 Like
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Thanks Oberon for the new Plamo Beta release including PlaMo Gear 21.08 :slight_smile:

Brief question: do you have any idea whether a default e-mail application is in the works/to be included in PlaMo?

4

Some of the PlaMo devs have been looking into a simple mail client in Kirigami, but there has been nothing announced.

1 Like
5

Roundcube works quite well on a mobile platform, depending on the web browser of course.

6

It is true. Sometimes calls, SMS or internet connection do not work. I see GSM devices (nmcli d) under different names (quectelqmi_ <№> (usually), ttyUSB2, cdc-wdm0, completely missing, …) and in different states (connected, connecting (unfortunately permanently: D), disconnected, unavailable, …)
Is there a guide on how to reinitialize these services without restarting PP? I am especially interested in connecting to a mobile operator and connecting to the Internet.
(Usually I succeed with systemctl restart eg25-manager, systemctl restart ofonoctl and systemctl restart NetworkManager, but sometimes I have to repeat them, change the order, and sometimes I give up and restart my PP.)

7

Yeah, there is until now no really usable Mail app available. Geary mobile runs, but painfully slow. And NO DAV for calendar/contacts available ATM

8

Haven’t used this release in a while, but after a week or so of testing I can say it has come a long ways. Looking forward to seeing it progress even more.

The keyboard issue is sometimes frustrating, but mostly useable. One thing I did notice while testing apps that are not preinstalled, is that I cannot uninstall them from the Discover app(get permission denied). Easy enough to do via sudo command, but another minor inconvenience. I also ran into a brief issue where I could not update or install apps with both the Discover app and the command line, but deleting the db.lck file from /var/lib/pacman was a quick fix. Not sure what caused the lock file to stay in the first place(even after a reboot); maybe a crash, but can’t be certain.

Anywho, keep up the good work. Both phosh and plasma are great offerings for a “development” device and the speed at which they are improving is impressive. I’ll stick with plasma for now and try and file as many bugs as I can find.

9

I tried to use cronie to reboot the phone when the modem is down but with no succes since I would have to sudo in cronie.
Does anyone know how to get sudo cronie to work?

10

My workaround for this is (I’m using pmos/xfce4) is a script I made that just disables both network manager and modem manager that I run every time I know my screen will be off for more than a couple minutes, then running another script to enable them after I wake my phone up.

Also, I’ve noticed that when network manager is still reading wifi networks when the modem tries to connect, it will fail and require a reboot.

So I just keep everything disabled on boot, then manually enable either wifi or the modem depending on if I’m trying to connect to WiFi or 4G. You could also just wait a few seconds after booting to start the modem.

Without wifi disabled my phone always has issues trying to connect to 4G when driving down the road, seemingly because all of the wifi networks that is jamming up network manager.

I’m not sure it’ll alleviate the issue for you but it’s been working pretty good for me with my setup.

The only distro that seems to wake the modem up and connect really fast reliably (mostly) is UT, however it’s been a couple months since I’ve been using pmos/xfce.

Let me know if you decide to use this method and if it works, very curious.

The only reason I switched to pmos/xfce is because i really wanted typing suggestions and they work great with onboard. Last time I tried plasma they didn’t work in most apps, and only the terminal iirc.

Thanks for all the hard work everyone involved!

11

Restarting the phone is exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
(I have no experience with cronie)

12

Apparently, demon cooperation is pretty hell. :thinking: Hopefully the announced transition to ModemManager will put that right.
I’m using PP in the configuration:

  • eMMC - Manjaro/PlaMo for “stable” daily use
  • uSD - multi-distro for experiments (current version allows individual distributions update :+1:).

However, pmOS/XFCE is not offered by multi-distro (the author requires an official image and it probably isn’t), so I won’t try this.
I have only run UT once. Thanks for the tip, I’ll take a look.

13

For testing ModemManager I suggest to give Phosh Dev Daily a test-run: Releases · manjaro-pinephone/phosh-dev · GitHub

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(@oberon) Why is the bugtracker not public? :thinking:

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It is public. You have been using it for a while. :wink:

16

You’re right, it’s public.:+1: It’s just that my browsers dedicated to testing and limiting snooping from companies like Facebook and Google use SOCKS5, and there’s something going on for https://gitlab.manjaro.org that I haven’t encountered yet. I mistakenly attributed it to non-public access.

17

What is the relationship between dev, Nightly (above) and branches?
(+ Is it possible to see, without downloading the whole image, the dev version of /etc/pacman.conf? I’d like to compare it with mine.)

18

The defference is that the Dev image is based on unstable branch and uses [kde-unstable] repo for all the Plasma packages, while branches are just different update schedules. Unstable branch is every day, testing branch once or twice per week and stable branch usually every 2 weeks or so.

The Dev version of pacman.conf, is the same as our regular pacman.conf, except it has the [kde-unstable] repo added as the first repo in the list.

19

Thanks. I’m trying, but I’m still not sure.:woozy_face: Sorry. I’m paraphrasing with examples.

Manjaro branches differ only in the frequency with which packages in directories are maintained by a bot (in our case arm-stable, arm-testing, arm-unstable). Where Pacman reaches is set with # pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch <my_choice>.
The dev variant of Manjaro/PlaMo takes KDE Plasma Mobile applications packages from directory kde-unstable, the regular one from community. I don’t know what exactly was meant by “image is based on unstable branch”. Dev branch of arm-profiles?
Images are created for the purposes of flashing. Dev by sudo buildarmimg -d pinephone -e plasma-mobile-dev -v 20210226 -b unstable command, regular by sudo buildarmimg -d pinephone -e plasma-mobile -v 20210226 -b stable -s plasma-mobile -o (nice article :+1:).
Correct?

20

Not quite. The dev variant is based on unstable branch and has [kde-unstable] repo active.
The “stable” variant is based currently based on testing branch, but does not have [kde-unstable] repo.

Again, not quite. The plasma-mobile-dev profile no longer exists. The dev image is build by doing something like this:

sudo buildarmimg -d pinephone -e plasma-mobile -v 20210226 -b unstable -k kde-unstable

and regular is just using -b testing and without the -k part.

1 Like