Manjaro ARM 19.12 Official Release - PineBook Pro

[ctrlX]

Just wanted to say that you are doing amazing work on the Pinebook Pro. I really appreciate that you have already done so much on the image. Having a Arch-like experience on the PBP is a dream for me as I do think that the official Debian image falls a bit short, as do all Debian based distributions in my opinion. You know., old package versions and stuff The OEM installer is a great feature. The official image should have this also. It is a bit of a pain having to create a new user account, change settings such as locale and keyboard layout etc.

Both preview 1 and 2 has worked for me surprisingly well. Even the WiFi has worked rather well for me. I have however not pushed it to it's limits.

The biggest issue for me with preview 2 is the sound. For me it is very audible. It is a constant hissing sound and sometimes there is even a rather loud "popping" sound. Makes the PBP annoying to use at the moment...

Keep up the good work! Very impressed with your work and even became a Patreon. That's how impressed I am! Cheers!

[DrYak]

The biggest issue for me with preview 2 is the sound. For me it is very audible. It is a constant hissing sound and sometimes there is even a rather loud "popping" sound. Makes the PBP annoying to use at the moment...

Yup, same here to. That's exactly what I wanted to say with my comment:

But the speaker are extremely noisy if there's no sound playing (it seems/sounds that their level is left floating when there's no output)

It looks like some low-level problem (is there a firmware being used? bugs in the driver? bugs in the parameters / device tree describing the wiring of the sound chip ? sorry I'm new in the SBC world, my day job is at the other end of the Linux scale, more big-iron) where the speaker (or more likely its amplifier) is left floating when there is no sound playing and its amplifier is picking up random electrical noise within the computer (the touchpad seem a big source in my tests).

As soon as there's sound playing, there's a pop (speaker's amp getting suddenly connected to an actual signal ?) and the noise is greatly reduced while there's sound playing.
As soon as the pulseaudio mixing daemon stops sending sound to the alsa driver, the noise returns (speaker's amp again left floating freely ?)

[tophneal]

Anyone tried out Wayland yet on Manjaro, yet? I just thought of this (or I would've installed it last night) while reading the linked article mrfritsche posted about Debos. I remember lima being okay, but usable on the Pinebook1080. I'm curious if Panfrost is any better. It would be great to have Night Light available, instead of Redshift/Geoclue2, which I've had nothing but problems with.

[Wizzard]

Can somebody confirm if KDE acceleration works?

[cristobalhdez]

The system crashed after last update.
I'm unable to boot into the system.
The problem seems to be related to Xorg not founding any display.

[chzbacon]

Heya,
Thanks so much for this build. I appreciate all the hard work that's gone into getting Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro. I've been testing it out for a few hours now. I'm currently running it on a SD card. I just wanted to jump in and give a little feedback. I know some of these were mentioned in the post already, but just wanted to share my experience.

The bad

• Wifi is still a bit flaky.
  
• The XFCE build does indeed have graphical glitch issues and you need to hit esc after booting.
  
• Sound does work, but the volume level is really low (much lower than the default debian build). It also doesn't seem to work until you adjust the volume with via the function key, and then it works. There is also an audible crackling which was noted in the post on the Manjaro forum.
  
• I also noticed when the wifi crashed it basically rendered the entire desktop unusable.
  

The good

• After switching to the fbturbo driver things seem to be a little more stable and screen tearing isn't as bad. I've also not had any issues with wifi so far since switching graphics drivers.
  
• The function keys work really well, except the suspend (as noted int he post). I haven't tried an external display.
  
• Locking the trackpad via the function key seems to help out with the current trackpad issues which plague all of the current builds for the pinebook. If you use a mouse and disable the trackpad it works really well. (even disabling the trackpad in the default debian build causes any input on the trackpad to be detected which prevents you from typing on the keyboard.
  

Overall a great update to the first preview image. I very much appreciate all the hard work that has gone into these images. In my opinion Manjaro will be the idea distro for the Pinebook Pro. I would think anyone using the Pinebook Pro is likely going to want bleeding edge software and updates making Manjaro a great solution to that. Kudos and keep up the great work. 

Update:
The privacy switches also seem to work well.
meta+F10 = disables the microphones
meta+F11 = disables the wifi (once renabled you'll need to reboot for wifi to work again which is a known bug)
meta+F12 = disables the webcam

[spikerguy]

Anyone tried out Wayland yet on Manjaro, yet? I just thought of this (or I would've installed it last night) while reading the linked article mrfritsche posted about Debos. I remember lima being okay, but usable on the Pinebook1080. I'm curious if Panfrost is any better. It would be great to have Night Light available, instead of Redshift/Geoclue2, which I've had nothing but problems with.

Yes I have tried Manjaro with Mainline Kernel, panfrost & wayland over KDE-Plasma, It seems to work fine, Panfrost is very much stable(Partially) though but its getting there. All you have to do is get a working Kde-Plasma Image and remove xf86-video-fbturbo-git then install wayland and switch to wayland on login screen.

Do share your experience with wayland on panfrost.

Can somebody confirm if KDE acceleration works?

I think the preview2-kde-plasma is having panfrost by default, And it have seem to work very smooth. Tried playing video on mpv & youtube it worked quite well for me. But you may try it yourself. 

The system crashed after last update.
I'm unable to boot into the system.
The problem seems to be related to Xorg not founding any display.

Please try to get into TTY2 and update again. If you're on KDE then there was a mis-match in kde apps & lib versions. Mostly an upstream issue but Strit have done a great job of downgrading them libs and got it to work.


UPDATE:
Strit have found the issue and have pushed an update to the repo.
Pushed a new update to the 

Code:

pinebookpro-post-install

 package that fixes it, but if you can't get in to update, you can get to a TTY and run:

Code:

sudo rm /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-touchpad.conf

Then reboot.

Please try the above and share your feedback.

UPDATE2: New Kernel release should fix the audio crackling, Once it is uploaded to the repo then please update the kernel by running

Code:

sudo pacman -S linux-pinebookpro

Thanks

[mfritsche]

@spikerguy

I notice that on the default debian image (kernel 4.4.196) the eMMC is /dev/mmcblk1 and the SD is /dev/mmcblk0.
With manjaro/ the your 5.4, the eMMC is /dev/mmcblk2 and the SD is /dev/mmcblk1

Is that caused by the 5.4 kernel line or something different?

[Wizzard]

Can somebody please post KInfocenter Display-OpenGL section?

[Luke]

meta+F11 = disables the wifi (once renabled you'll need to reboot for wifi to work again which is a known bug)

@chzbacon not a bug but a feature more seriously tho, WiFi is using the SDIO interface - it itsn't plug-and-play like USB 2.0 - so once you cut power to it, you'll need to reboot so the kernel 'sees' it on boot.