This month in Manjaro (October 2021)
This is my periodic posts on whats going on in Manjaro land.
It's a small collection of notable changes, updates and community news in and for the Manjaro community.
As I am a Manjaro ARM developer, some of the information will probably be ARM-biased.
See this as a Manjaro Podcast, but in written form.
This post was a bit late. Sorry.
Week 1
Manjaro 21.1.4 and 21.1.5 issues
A flaw in the Manjaro 21.1.4 and 21.1.5 install medias prevented people from installing non-btrfs systems. 21.1.3 did not have this issue and a fixed version of 21.1.5 was made available within a day or two of the flaw being discovered.
Some have LightDM issues
In this weeks Stable update, some people where reporting that LightDM no longer wanted to start. Seems an edit to /etc/mkinitcpio.conf can fix it.
Week 2
Pamac blocked from AUR
Pamac was once again blocked by the AUR developers this week. The reason was the same as last time, which meant that the Pamac developer now had to include some fixes to not flood the AUR search API. Should be fixed in libpamac-11.1.3-1 and pamac-10.2.2-5.
Manjaro ARM 21.10 released
This week we also released 90 new Manjaro ARM images, for most of our supported devices. It's mostly just updated packages, fixing a few bugs relating to the install process and a new wallpaper, splashscreen and lockscreen for the Plasma edition.
Pinephone Pro was announced
Pine64 announced the Pinephone Pro in this months blog post, which features a new SoC (rk3399s), which is custom made for this phone, together will all the nice things the rk3399 brings, like better GPU, more RAM, and USB-C Video out. And we are proud to be selected as the default Operating System once again and will start bringing in support for this new device to packages very soon(tm).
Week 3
Raspberry Pi cmdline.txt issues
The Raspberry Pi foundation updated their kernels this week, which introduced a pretty big change regarding audio. This required some changes in the cmdline.txt file in our Raspberry Pi images. After we fixed that, the Raspberry Pi foundation made new changes, making us having to fix the file again.
Working Pinephone Pro Alpha image
The ARM team also created the first working Manjaro ARM image for the Pinephone Pro, so Pine64 could test it out. It's going to be using a separate Pinephone Pro specific kernel to support all the new hardware in it.
Beelink SER3 with Manjaro
Beelink also agreed to sell their new SER3 mini PC with Manjaro as an install option. These devices will be available on Amazon, eBay and other worldwide sites. But to get Manjaro on it, you need to put it in the comment of the order, since the devices have Windows by default, but Beelink has agreed to pre-install Manjaro for those that want it. The devive has not released yet.
Week 4
ModemManager in Plasma Mobile not ready on time
Plasma Mobile have been working on switching from Ofono to ModemManager the last couple of months. The developers initially hoped everything would be ready for Plasma 5.23 release, so they started getting the stuff in Plasma Phone Components ready for that. Quickly after that they got Plasma Settings ported and a couple of weeks after that, Spacebar (the SMS app). The development on the Plasma Dialer port was started pretty late in this cycle, which means that at the end of October, the ModemManager port of Plasma Dialer was still not ready. All this resulted in Plasma Mobile Gear 21.10 being skipped, as it was not a finished product. This however does result in a few issues, since Plasma Phone Components use ModemManager now, but Plasma Settings, Spacebar and Plasma Dialer still use Ofono. And both can't access the modem at the same time. So telephony is likely going to be broken in Plasma Mobile until Plasma Mobile Gear 21.11.