My two Pinephones are dying, they have the same symptom, their touchscreens’ borders stop working, that’s why I must use my Librem 5 now. I tried to use two weekly installers (12-01-2025 and 22-12-2024) but I just briefly saw the Mobian logo, I only got a black screen just after and nothing happened even after having waited for half an hour.
Which installers are known to work? Must I use JumpDrive? By the way, I would like to install the operating system on the emmc and I need full disk encryption.
I followed the procedure, I used the latest image (not the installer image) with JumpDrive. When I booted, I briefly saw the Mobian logo and the following error message appeared:
hctosys: unable to read the hardware clock
I’m going to try again with another image. Thank you for the suggestion.
There’s a problem with the hardware, it doesn’t recognize my SIM card, it’s a defect. I’m going to contact the support.
I’m really sorry, I’m losing patience. I paid about 900 $ (VAT included) for a smartphone unable to detect my SIM card. Either it’s a software problem that I’ll have to fix (my SIM card is detected by my Pinephones under Mobian…) or it’s really an hardware problem, which will lead me to demand a refund.
P.S: It’s not a nano SIM and I put it into the correct slot near the battery. When I enter lsusb -vt, I see the modem whose id is 2020:2060. sudo mmcli -m 0 shows the modem too. I’m going to switch to a nano SIM but if it doesn’t work, I will be unable to step back.
Thank you so much. It’s weird as this slot looks like a micro SIM card slot, it has exactly the same size but Purism website mentions only nano SIM as the supported SIM size. After reading your message, I bought a low cost nano SIM card to perform a test and I confirm that it’s correctly detected.
I’ll ask Orange France (my mobile operator) to turn my micro SIM card into a nano SIM card Monday, it should work as good as the cheap Lycamobile SIM card.
Does someone know how to display the arrow keys in the virtual keyboard? The Terminal input doesn’t show them unlike on my Pinephone whereas it’s very useful to find previously entered command lines. I use command line interface a lot, for example to work around the limitations of the build-in alarm software with at, to update the system, to do some backups, to convert the sqlite contacts file into VCF, etc.
Normally: Switch to the “Terminal” on-screen keyboard. The default on-screen keyboard (which in turn may depend on your chosen locale) typically doesn’t have the arrow keys at all. If this works then the arrow keys will appear above the normal keys of the keyboard on the screen. I don’t know whether this works on Mobian.
As an aside, so do I.
Enable an SSH server on the phone and just ssh in from a bigger computer. Then you can use your normal keyboard and screen.
Or dare I say, attach a normal keyboard via USB to the USB port of the phone.
Or dare I say, pair a Bluetooth keyboard with the phone.
All three of these options work for me on my phone, but most frequently I just ssh in if I am going to be doing lots of command line work on the phone.
Your suggestions are good when I can bring another keyboard or when a bigger computer is close to me, not when I’m hiking in the middle of nowhere or looking for the identifier of a song in a JSON file in a karaoke pub. I’ll try to use the dock of my Pinephone with the Librem 5.
I’ve just started to use the Librem 5, the nano SIM works very well as expected, everything seems to work at least as good as on the Pinephone but with a much better screen, a better battery, a more powerful CPU. I’m sure that I’ll find a suitable solution for the arrow keys. The only annoying thing is Jumpdrive, it’s harder to use than Tow-Boot, the procedure is more cumbersome and error prone, I need to transfer lots of pictures from my phone to my computer occasionally, Bluetooth isn’t an option (too slow).
As far as I know, I need to use an installer (not Jumpdrive) to enable Full Disk Encryption, am I wrong?
I have a portable Bluetooth keyboard (well, actually two of them) both of which work well with the Librem 5 running PureOS and both of which are small enough for this to be reasonable. However I understand that if you are hiking in the middle of nowhere, you might want to keep extra ballast to an absolute minimum.
There are several topics on transferring files. Best to search and pursue elsewhere.
Personally, I use sshfs, which, with care, should work even if you are hiking in the middle of nowhere, assuming of course a half-decent internet connection on your phone and that the destination computer and/or phone are accessible from the internet.
(When using PureOS) Recommended approach: To switch between not-encrypted and encrypted, or vice versa, you must completely reflash your phone. That is to say, the choice between encrypted and not-encrypted is made at the time you flash the phone by virtue of the choice as to which disk image you download.
In theory LUKS does allow such a switch but … I would play it safe on any distro.
I’ll try both the accessible virtual keyboard and the portable Bluetooth keyboard if the former solution doesn’t please me enough. Which are the two keyboards that work well with the Librem 5?
Thank you, it’s an option to consider, it would be viable if I sent some pictures each day instead of moving hundreds of pictures at the end of the event.
I know that I must reflash my phone to enable Full Disk Encryption but the last time I tried two installers for Mobian, none worked. Am I condemned to wait for a working installer to make such a switch? Am I missing something?
Yesterday, the battery went from 20% to 9% in a few seconds whereas the Librem 5 wasn’t hot and then, it became unable to charge for hours. After that, I discovered that my powerbank wasn’t supported (Essentielb Boulanger). For now, I’m forced to use alternatively the Librem 5 with remaining connectivity problems and a Pinephone with a dying screen.
I’m the only people to blame, I wanted to use the same powerbank than with my Pinephones but it’s not mentioned in the list of supported hardware for the Librem 5 and it’s a bit “old” (i.e it doesn’t support many recent smartphones anyway). I’ll probably buy a powerbank UGreen 25000mAh supporting PD 3.1 to solve this problem.
