Manjaro ARM Beta 20 with Phosh (PinePhone / PinephonePro)

ARM Releases
, , ,
1

Manjaro ARM Beta20 of Phosh for PinePhone!

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

image

Those images either run the 5.15 kernel from Megi, which is designed for the PinePhone or 5.16 kernel by Mobian, which supports the PinePhonePro.

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

Changes since Beta19

  • Chatty got it’s second beta-release of 0.5 series
  • uboot supports now booting from eMMC and SD on the PinephonePro
  • eg25-manager handles resetting of the modem better
  • We had the regular ICU 70.1 rebuilds
  • ModemManager got updated to 1.18.4
  • More polish to Phosh and Phoc
  • PinePhonePro gained initial audio support with VoiceCall
  • Alsa got updated to 1.2.6.1
  • Chatty is now at 0.5.0beta3
  • eg25-manager 0.4.2 officially introduced PPP support
  • firefox got renewed to 95.0
  • Kernel is now at 5.15.7 and 5.16-rc4
  • phosh got updated to 0.14.1
  • vvmd 0.7-1 and vvmplayer 1.4-1 enhanced VoiceMail experience

A detailed list of package changes can be found here.

Currently broken:

  • GPS may not work as it should

Known issues

  • Chatty may crash with experimental features like MMS enabled. You may disable them via gsettings set sm.puri.Chatty experimental-features false if that is the case
  • 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 Beta20
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 Beta21 here

  • Beta20 (2021-12-15) Download

    • based on stable branch

  • Dev (2021-12-17) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • alsa-ucm-pinephone gained more adjustments for the PinePhonePro
    • Chatty is now at 0.5.0-Beta4
    • Calls got renewed to 42alpha0
    • Kernel is now at 5.15.9
    • megapixels is at 1.4.3
    • phoc 0.11.0 uses now wlsroot 0.14.1

  • Dev (2021-12-23) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • eg25-manager gained more audio improvement for the PinePhonePro
    • gnome-calls 42alpha0 got additional UX improvements added
    • Kernel for the PinePhone is now at 5.15.11. Also we fixed Audio issues in 5.16-rc6-2 for PinePhonePro
    • pinephone-manjaro-tweaks fixed an issue with upgrading the Plasma-Mobile Factory image of PinePhone Beta Edition to be able to update via Discover
    • squeekboard got a new stable release as in 1.15.0

  • Dev (2022-01-03) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • PipeWire is at 0.3.42
    • Firefox got renewed to 95.0.2
    • More patches to Calls to enhance SIP
    • More fixes to packagekit
    • Kernel got updated to 5.15.12
    • Mesa is now at 21.3.3
    • More small enhancements to Phosh and Phoc
    • Python got updated to 3.10
    • Qt6 got added, we have to check which apps depend on it
    • Systemd is now at 250
    • Xorg-Server is at 21.1.2

  • Dev (2022-01-05) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • improvements for Pipewire on callaudiod
    • more patches to Chatty, Phosh and Phoc
    • eg25-manager handles now modem firmware flashes much better. Preparation for fwupd
    • mmsd-tng is now at 1.7
    • We dropped Telegram including Qt5 and Qt6
    • siglo is at 0.9.6
    • xorg-server is at 21.1.3

  • Dev (2022-01-07) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • switched to Pipewire
    • PipeWire is now at 0.3.43 including some additional upstream patches to make switching of audio-profiles work
    • callaudiod got renewed to 0.1.3 including more enhancements for pipewire
    • Kernel is now at 5.15.13
    • More patches to Phosh which now supports to dismiss notifications via swipes

  • Dev (2022-01-15) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • Kernel got updated to 5.16.0
    • Bluez is now at 5.63
    • Firefox got renewed to 96.0
    • Gnome parts are now at 41.3
    • Mesa is at 21.3.4
    • systemd got updated to 250.2
    • Regular updates to Phosh, Calls and Chatty

  • Dev (2022-01-22) Download

    • based on unstable branch
    • callaudiod tracks and exports current states
    • chatty is now at 0.6.0-beta
    • Firefox got updated to 96.0.2
    • we use now a more mobile friendly version of Gnome-Clocks
    • Kernel got updated to 5.16.2
    • Systemd is now at 250.3
    • Uboot for the regular Pinephone got updated to 2022.01
    • Phosh and Phoc got additional patches
      • we support now complex passwords at lockscreen
      • initial VPN support got added
      • we use wlroots 0.15.0
6 Likes
2

Missing bootsplash (and slow OSK appearance after switching to unstable) i reported in the beta19 topic are fixed in fresh install of beta20.

edit: bootsplash stopped working on 3:rd boot. Only thing i did on 2nd boot was enable mobile data.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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

1 Like
6

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.

7

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.

8

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!

9

(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

10

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.

11

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.

12

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

13

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

1 Like
14

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?

15

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!

16

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:

1 Like
17

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.

18

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

19

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.

20

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)