Manjaro 20.04 released

[evantaylor]

I tried the Manjaro 20.04 xfce version on SD card and it worked well. Downloaded the emmc installer, installed fine and works well. But now I can't boot from any SD card in the reader or in  USB port. I have tried SD cards with Debian, Ubuntu, and Armbian, all of which were booting and working before installing Manjaro xfce 20.04 to emmc.

Does anyone else see this problem?

Is there a way to to correct it?

Yes, this is happening to me as well except my out of the box latest Debian SD card does boot.  I just did a Manjaro install coming from the latest Debian I haven't figured out what is happening with the SD card or the eMMC install. This puts a damper on Manjaro 20.04 release ouch?

Thank you for your conformation of my problem.

I have read the new posts at https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-arm-...sed/133374 and there seems to be at least one person with similar problems, but no conformation or solution at this time.

I have done some more testing to get a better understanding of what the situation is and would like to document what I have found so people on this forum will have some idea of what may happen after installing Manjaro (xfce version at least) to the eMMC.

1. I downloaded, created, and ran Manjaro xfce 20.04. It ran better than other distributions that I have tried so I decided to flash it to eMMC and use it as my default distribution. I use/need wireguard, firefox, thunderbird, and it seems to run them without issues or failures. It also does not become unresponsive at times as Bionic Mate and others do.

2. I downloaded the emmc installer version and flashed it to an SD card with (as root):
    xzcat Manjaro-ARM-xfce-pbpro-20.04-emmc.img.xz | dd bs=4M of=/dev/mmcblk0
That went well and I booted from the SD card created. I used the esc key during the boot to get past the glitch and the card copied the system to eMMC as it should. Rebooted and installed setting user, passwords, etc.  All went fine and the system boots and runs as expected. 

3. I tried booting some other distributions (that I had been running/testing) from SD cards, and none of them would boot. Manjaro boots and runs instead of the SD cards. I tried Bionic Mate, Debian Mate, and Armbian Mate, all with no success. I tried each of them in the SD card reader and all USB ports with no success.  I can read and write on the SD card or USB ports, but not boot.

4. I then tried the Manjaro xfce SD card I had been testing and it booted!

5. I downloaded Manjaro-ARM-kde-plasma-pbpro-20.04-emmc-installer-20.04.img.xz flashed it to a SD card and it booted (using the esc key) and offered to install.  I declined the install.

6. Just to be sure, I downloaded bionic-mate-pinebookpro-0.9.14-1159-armhf.img.xz and flashed it to a SD card. It would not boot.

I have no experience with or knowledge of uboot, but this appears to be a problem/incompatibility in the uboot systems used. I hope it can be fixed without loosing all of the effort put into other distributions or Manjaro xfce.

I am going to continue to use Manjaro xfce as it is the best and most complete distribution for my use case.  It does however severely limit the usefulness of the PBPro for experimenting with other distributions on SD cards.  

So, if you install Manjaro 20.04 (xfce at least) to eMMC you could loose the ability to boot other distributions on SD cards.

I will join the Manjaro forum and post this there as well.

Did you use the "sync" command after dd-ing the bionic mate image?  If it will boot ANY SD card, it's likely not the eMMC installed image, but a problem with the sd card image.  Also, many, many sd cards fail, they are terrible -- I have 20 Raspberry Pi's in my lab and had to dump sandisk (75% failure rate) completely and ONLY buy Samsung sd cards (< 5% failure rate).

Otherwise, this thing is clocking in at 25-30 second cold boots (down from 90-120+ seconds), and has some nice performance improvements.  I'm very pleased with this, and hope I can eventually move to an encrypted partition eventually (now that /boot is separate).