Manjaro ARM Developer-Release for PineTab

Hi all.

It’s been a while since I last put out some images for the PineTab. Mostly because the development of our Phosh and Plasma Mobile profiles have been so rapid the last couple of months, it’s been hard to keep up.

Also, the PineTab sold by Pine64 right now and the dev unit I have for testing, have different display panels. So we need to choose which to support. And I finally took the plunge, and decided to “support” the one sold in the store. This however does mean, that I have no way of actually testing the images, to see what works and what not.

So just under this post, is a wiki post. When you find an issue with either of these images, please post about it in the correct section or even a solution/workaround, that could be implemented.

So here’s the new images for download:
Phosh: Downloading File /pinetab/phosh/dev-20201017 - Manjaro ARM - OSDN
Plasma Mobile Dev: Downloading File /pinetab/plasma-mobile-dev/dev-20201017 - Manjaro ARM - OSDN

These images are also available in the Manjaro ARM Flasher.

Known Issues - PineTab Phosh:

  • Orientation is switched 180 degrees
  • Sound is not working
  • Scaling is too large

Known Issues - Pinetab Plasma Mobile Dev:

  • Orientation is switched 180 degress
  • Much slower than it should be
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Pine Tab Phosh:
Landscape orientation is top down

Pinetab Plasma Mobile Dev:
Landscape orientation is top down

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Thank you Strit for working on this. I am commenting on the Phosh image for this particular post (comparing with Mobian and Arch Linux ARM images). As noted by zash1958, the landscape orientation needs to be rotated 180 degrees. Wireless and bluetooth work. Sound does not work (it might with further configuration of alsamixer). Overall the scaling is too large-almost 2 times what it should be-this is for everything including icons, not just apps. The onscreen keyboard is almost 1/3 of the screen, for example. I had mentioned this with the previous release of Manjaro Phosh for the Pinetab. Neither Mobian or Arch Linux ARM have the same scaling issue, but Arch Linux ARM has an issue with the onscreen keyboard being too small (Mobian’s is just right). I hope this helps.

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Hi Strit, I took a quick look at Pinetab Plasma. I haven’t seen Plasma on a mobile device-only on a desktop. Overall it has a nice appearance, but it is almost too slow to be useful. I am using the same SD card as the Phosh testing and was surprised that Plasma was really dragging along. The good news is that wireless, bluetooth, and sound worked. The apps were so slow to open that I gave up. I don’t know how much faster it would be on eMMC, but unless it was a quantum leap in speed, it wouldn’t be worth the bother to flash it to trial it. As a reference point, with the SD card I am using, there is little difference in speed when running Mobian from the SD card or the eMMC.

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Thanks a lot
I will flash one and test the other one from the SD, and feddback you.
I found yesterday widevine - DRM - is not installed so Prime Video cannot be watched.
Is this by choice?
If not, it would be nice to be able to add prime video, and I suppose other content to be consumed in the tablet.

I love the scaling
But I am a 55 years old man with presbyopia
Wrote that an option to set up it from big to small, is always better, than when I have to wonder where settings are.
PS: 4k default desktop font size “kills” me.

There is no Widevine plugin for aarch64 in general.
We have gotten around this by using a custom Chromium armv7h install that has this on some devices. But it’s a workaround, not a solution. And there won’t be a solution, until Google decides to release widevine as an aarch64 library. They have said they would for 5 years now, still hasn’t happened.

So no, this is not by choice. It’s decided by the Google overlords.

phosh flashed

  • WiFi does not work until you set the password and then reboot

  • Time zone UTC Madrid has 2 values CET (actually GMT+2) that is the official one and GMT+0 that is the natural one, and is not easy to set up manually.

  • Sound - internal - not working testing with BT “front right” does not produce the front right sound.

  • Power settings are very conservative - 5 minutes -, 15 minutes would be a better default in my opinion.

  • I found no way to change users / passwords

  • Kodi needs windowed mode to set up - and I suppose some other software too - or some way of auto hide for the bars, but that is being worked in the phosh developers community -

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Plasma

  • Fixed orientation - It does not switch -
  • WiFi - as with phosh - needs reboot to work after setting passwords
  • Maximum font size barely readable for me - 55 years old man with presbyopia - Imagine that problem with the phone screen
  • No password change item in settings
  • Sound working

Waiting for landscape and maximum font size fixes to test more things.

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I had previously read that the keyboard/UI scaling were heavily linked in Phosh. (That’d be soooo great if that’s wrong.) It’s been a while since I even looked at Mobian, what are the scaling values set at in Mobian’s phoc.ini? We should be able to make that change/test it ourselves.

I’m noticing in the Phosh img that there’s now a nifty tile to indicate whether the Tab is docked with the keyboard or not. It currently does not change when the Tab is docked. It also appears that Camera (Megapixels?) no longer launches.

Two questions,

  1. is the 1017 build the most recent phosh dev build for pinetab? and is this the “right” thread to be discussing it?
  2. assuming the answer to 1 is yes and yes, I installed it this morning and after a full update it boots fine. The camera and sound do not work, is that expected? Also is there anyway to change the default screen size? it seems to be set for something closer to the phone.

Thanks

November 24th yay update …

Thanks a lot-

Finally, we can use the keyboard with the screen in landscape in the correct position

But the cross we had to close software disappeared and you have to touch and slowly move the windows (program box) up to close it.

Scaling is not too big, please keep it that way or at least make an option to keep it that way. Older eyes are very ok with this scaling.

Sound still not working

How to rotate the tablet to landscape in plasma? Mine starts and stays always in portrait mode. Keyboard docked or not!

@Strit, we may want to add Lomiri at some point also.

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NO way, plasma-mobile is not switchable to the correct orientation. Only runs in portrait mode

I experienced similar issues to other posters with Plasma Mobile. Stuck in portrait mode and the scaling on the lockscreen seemed off. The status bar text in the lockscreen was very small compared to the rest. Also, I’m not sure if I did something strange, but after leaving the tablet on my table for a minute it autolocked and then when I tried typing the same PIN I used earlier (123456) it wouldn’t work anymore. I had to restart the tablet to get in again.

Just tried updating Plasma Mobile with pacman -Syu and after about two weeks of updates getting installed, the Pinetab booted to a black screen and I wasn’t even able to access tty. Did something change with the boot applications?