This is not my work but only a days work by the Manjaro Arm team.
There are two very early preview images KDE & LXQT
Both running on mainline 5.1
I have uploaded them to my onedrive until I actually ask if links can be given for their personal next cloud servers and its just a sneaky unauthorised preview of their work.
I think I prefer the KDE one which came as a surprise as tried KDE a long time back and didn’t like at all.
If you are like me I suggest taking another look, as this version you might actually like.
Last time I looked at KDE was a long time ago and its strange how impressions can last
The manjaro guys are trying to get 5.2 going really which is RC5 and prob early July release,
So they will prob post when they have something but check out the Manjaro forum and like I say maybe donate a beer or pizza or 2.
haha, actually I am the same, tried it years ago and thought it to be excruciatingly heavy.
Maybe I will give it another go
So far I am just distrohopping around to see what will work best on the Rock Pi that arrived yesterday.
Will give some feedback once I get home and have a chance to test.
cheers
Despite only testing for a little while, I think the KDE was a really “polished” experience. Also loved that the turn monitor 90 degrees was part of the settings from the get go as that is something I need.
I did seem to be missing hardware acceleration so window movements was choppy.
It was less bloated that I remembered but still felt noticeably slower than the lxde and openbox distro on the ARM64 distro.
For Rock Pi I will go with something else, but for a laptop or desktop experience, it will be an easy choice to recommend to others for sure
Yeah there is no hardware acceleration in the 5.1 preview as for a rolling release its important for Manjaro to keep totally mainline.
5.2 sees the introduction of the Panfrost kernel drivers and with Mesa 19.1 some form of hardware acceleration should just work (That is really the 1st destination).
You will not even see an attempt of any form of hardware acceleration in 5.1 from the Manjaro preview, but you can not compare the Radxa specific hugely patched 4.4 version with custom packages as a like to Like.
You can check the lxqt version of 5.1 as a comparison and think it is similar but lxqt still has quite a way to go before it feels complete IMHO.
5.2 is a sort of watershed for Arm as the Panfrost & Lima KMS drivers means the closed sources Arm binary blobs can be dropped and further kernel versions will see optimisation and function additions.
So many new boards have been ‘working’ but stalled @ integrating the Arm Mali blobs into kernel revisions that its been a real pain.
For Rockchip the patches in 5.3 for HDMI audio & WiFI/BT prob with a bit of arm twisting will get backported to 5.2.
So mainline u-boot & mainline kernel is as good as here, if still rather bleeding edge as 4.4 for some is getting quite aged.
So probably we will see the availability of many distro’s great rolling releases like Arch / Manjaro and scheduled releases like Ubuntu 19.10 (5.3) in October.
I am massively happy that Manjaro is looking at the RK3399 as I purchased the RockPi4 to do exactly the same as being a big Arch fan I have been eager to see an ALARM version.
So many times I find myself on the Arch Wiki as my definitive source of info it would be disingenuous not to be an Arch fan boy.
But Manjaro does come in many flavours https://wiki.manjaro.org/index.php/Install_Desktop_Environments and from Mate, Lxqt, KDE the RK3399 with Mali-T860MP4 should give perfectly adequate results as we are talking a pretty big step up from what many with Raspberry experience are used to.
I am looking at your Iozone scores mouth open with a WTF look at the speed of that EVO 970!!!
I am the same when it comes to desktops, but it was Panfrost, Rockchip, Mainline all coming together in £50 SBC producing real world entry level computing from desktop to micro server, has been really interesting.
Hence why I have been trying m.2 sata to m.2 usb3.0 cards even have a M.2 to PCIex4 to try yet and its all just been curiosity more than application.
I have a rockpi4 in a sad state of dead pcie bridge and now sd card reader after dropping it that is a prime candidate for some OC play and dtbo mangling, just to see what it will push too, but the Arm boards really are starting to cover a spectrum of possible solutions.
Yeah there is a pretty bright future for Arm, rk3399 and linux out there I think sounds like some awesome stuff is coming our way with 5.2 and 5.3.
I have an Arch install with i3-gaps and dmenu running on an old lenovo laptop, and love it so far. (but have only run it for a very short time, maybe 2-3weeks and is not my main setup so it does not get the use it deserves), BUT it is essentially what I would like to get to in terms of environment for the RockPi too.
Then I stumbled on Void linux and its step away from systemd and thought, hey! they seems to have ARM support, and better yet, comes with cross compile tools(supposedly, I have not tried anything like that yet with void, but remember that it was fun back from the Gentoo days years ago)
So there are a lot of learning ahead for me before I get there as I am super rusty with all this haha.
Really what I am after is a super lightweight DE with i3-gaps and on a board with 1000mb nic that can run 4k@60hz monitor hardware accelerated (less will also do though haha )
If I cant get void to run before the 5.2 manjaro comes out, I might give that another try and throw i3-gaps on and see how it goes. once this runs from the m.2 it should be a pretty sweet system.
By the way I also tested the lxqt version, and will agree that the KDE version and felt like it was a more finished product to use
Yeah hopefully it does come in threes as had mine, sd reader totally my fault as caught the Ethernet cable with my foot and dragged it off the table and it landed perfect full force on the sd card.
PCIe strange as it slowly faded but again prob me having the ribbon flying whilst should of just disconnected. trying to use an sd card often with the current setup is a pain in the arse.
I can still get an emmc and use it.
The https://github.com/radxa/rockchip-bsp pulls in the various build scripts so guess you just need to couple the Void rootfs to the build script to create the final image.
Or maybe Manjaro might do a minimal as they have i3 in their repos.
haha yeah the sbc is a little exposed and easy to bump due to the size.
Mine have the passive heavy cooling profile on the rk3399 and another on the m.2 but will be ziptied in my DYI air cooled serverrack once I am happy so I dont end up doing the same thing. And yes I sorta came close already while swapping out a uSD card haha
Nice, will need to read up and re-educate myself on all this stuff. but thanks for the link.
I am proud to announce the immediate availability of Manjaro ARM 19.06.
We also started supporting the new Odroid N2 device, with a 4.9 kernel. It’s Hardkernels version of a RockPro64 board, just with an Amlogic S922x SoC.
So the Odroid-C2 prebuilt images have been switched for the Odroid-N2 ones.
We also finally support the rockpro64 , which we have worked for the last few months.
And the Rock64 prebuilt images has been switched for the RockPro64 ones.
And a last minute entry is support for the rockpi4 device, which is also an rk3399 based board.
Also in the repo Wifi&Bt drivers have just arrived ap6256-firmware-2019.06-3 when on linux kernel 5.2-rc6 sudo pacman -S linux-aarch64-rc linux-aarch64-rc-headers
The majaro minimal for a mainline server edition is also great addition. Always associate manjaro with a desktop and KDE & LXQT are also great but having a minimal version of mainline is also excellent.
Still some delays on Boot 5.1 isn’t that bad but increased in 5.2 but hopefully when the RC is finished and completed 5.2 should be extremely usable and the first real introduction of the Panfrost opensource Mali drivers.
To force panfrost remove the fbturbo-git driver pacman -R
To search the repo pacman -Ss
To install as above 'pacman -S`
Panfrost is looking extremely rapid but its not working well with the current mesa and drm
You can prob work out the above guide - kernel as that is already done with sudo pacman -S linux-aarch64-rc linux-aarch64-rc-headers
chmod 0666 /dev/dri/*
I am not all that great with compilers but the install that ended up at /usr/local/lib I copied to /usr/lib
then reboot
It does glitch but it gives you a real idea of the performance of the panfrost drivers and the mali KMS on rockpi4
Its bit of a hassle but the compile isn’t that long you may need zram https://github.com/StuartIanNaylor/zram-config ignore the error as its not needed for zram
Or create a swap if you have a 2gb/1gb version.
Its looking pretty damn impressive fingers crossed how much they get into 2019-07-09 19.1.2 release
All looks super promising
And I DO want to check it out, have just been swamped with work and a water leak in my apartment, so have not had a chance to get into things yet. Gotta finish up a few projects, and then try some of all the new possibilities.
I noticed that I have the Rock Pi ver 1.4 so should be able to flash the SPI to boot from m.2
then try zram and 5.2 with the new panfrost drivers on a minimal distro with either awesome WM or i3-gaps to see how this little beast performs.
thank you for sharing.
