Failed to install Mobian on the Librem 5

Software
1

Hello

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.

Best regards.

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Mobian stable.

Yes.

See also:

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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.

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4

I followed the exact same procedure a second time, dd took a lot longer but now, it seems to work, I can login. Thank you so much.

P.S: I still have to enable full disk encryption now.

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5

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.

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6

The nano-SIM card tray is on the left side of the phone, whereas the OpenPGP card slot is under the top of the battery.

Related:

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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.

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In the Squeekboard Terminal layout, tap the >_ key to bring up larger arrow keys, or use an accessible layout instead:

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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.

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