Hello? Can you hear me? and other frustrations

Hardware Librem 5
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@paulororke I share some of your general frustrations. Using this phone has been a rollercoaster (I may have thrown a couple of phones in the past, luckily never this one). There are always broken or disfunctional things but I’ve always been able to work through them one by one thanks to the forum community and a lot of time and patience. I’m known to family, friends and colleagues as “the one with the weird phone that can’t run apps” by now.

About copy-paste: I’m no longer able to select (and therefore copy) text in text (SMS) messages, but elsewhere I’m usually using the keyboard as well. Have a look at this post to avoid needing to switch to “terminal” layout all the time. Having arrow keys available is very nice, by the way, to avoid frustration with precise cursor positioning.

For YouTube I use FreeTube (Flatpak). If someone gives you a link you can simply paste it into the FreeTube search bar.

Good luck and remember, we’re here to help.

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I think the biggest difficulty with the Librem 5 is that it does work. It is a huge milestone as well. The engineers who worked on this largely had never done anything like this before, but they have managed to overcome VERY difficult odds to get us where we are now. They deserve nothing but praise.

The irony is that for Purism to truly make it the Librem 5 has to be mainstream-able. Right now this is just NOT possible. You have to be a tech savy individual who has dabbled frequently in Unix or Linux offerings.

There are bugs and glitches that happen all the time, and being able to understand that this is a Linux glitch and not a hardware glitch helps significantly.

One other thing that would truly be helpful is if the Librem 5 was utilizing the PCie lane the IMX8 offers with a mini nvme drive. The storage expansion would then make the L5 truly a one stop shop for your computing needs, as well as providing a snappy fast area for a MUCH needed swap space. On top of this the NVME storage space is far more resilient and made to be accessed way more time than the emmc memory the phones come with.

I truly hope that Purism can stay a float and keep providing updates to the Librem 5, but the impression I always get is that they are just barely hanging on. The erosion to public perception has been devastating. Before they do anything else, they need to convincingly address their public perception problem, and then move forward. Why they haven’t done this is beyond me.

All that said, the phone is VERY capable, especially with a lapdock. It requires advanced Linux knowledge to truly be functional, but this need to shrinking with each update. The developers of the Librem 5 are amazing!

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You can’t just hold down the whole message and copy it?

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WOW. What am amazing response from an amazing group of people!

Now I have a lot of reading and things to do.

I want to thank all of you who piped in with suggestions. I will, over the weekend go through all this, and give feedback on how it goes. I have 6 kids, and more demands on my time than I care to speak about here, so dedicating the time to doing the reading itself can be a challenge, and likely why I am in the situation I am.

I have to say, my frustrations melted away and were replaced with renewed optimism. I will be going through all this as time permits, and look forward to more discussion on my progress.

Thank you to each and every one who had suggestions.

… I’ll be back…

:grinning:

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With the carriers offering unlimited data plans, would the spot the WiFi card occupies be able to accommodate the mini drive or is that going to require a complete redesign?

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In my limited experience, off the shelf NVMe drives (like what you find down the street at Best Buy or Micro Center) would be too big. [Edit: Having opened my Librem 14, I can say the one inside it is also too big]

Has anybody seen any smaller ones?

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How do you charge the batteries that you swap out? And dow many do you carry with you? I bought a spare when I got my phone because I suspected I might need to do something like this but I realised that I would need to charge both batteries IN MY PHONE, which kind of defeated the purpose.

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You are so right pauloroke,

however its still a good choice to have it. I use amaroks Terminal-SKB way to solve it. Just the new Firefox sometimes ignore it.

For myself i ship around most bugs by using VPN/ssh to have access on my local hardware, where i running kind of own Webpage, which is connected to a fast computer with internet connection, which collects every news for me like RSS, Messages, Email. Weather Information, Train Traveling and so on. And i just pass important text fragments to my phone.

This way i have control to do anything with the lowest power input and got my information.

For the WiFi i had that issue too sometimes. Like the SIM-Card is not detected. But i had that with every phone sometimes, some androids too. And what helps me is a reboot. - Just to add. I disable WiFi if i do not need it and push it on every time i try to connect to a known network. I know some folks just add the new network and stay allays on. This is really energy wasting if you are not in reach. Just try to memorize places where you have a useful connection to activate it manually.

Hope for us we all can fix our issues soon.

I think there is no other Device i would trust, ok some GraphenOS Google Phones - but you know on Google Hardware. It still feels fishy - like using webkits, proprietary drivers for WLAN, 4G or camera. So no… there is today no alternative to my little Linux Phone.

I had recently changed some PureOS Store installations to actual Flatpack installations over PureOS Store. Check the Version numbers of your applications.

I’m looking forward to a good future and hope Crimson Support will be there too.

Remember the old days of drivers and Linux and how long it take to be really sexy. I knew it will be there sooner or later. I think i will use my L5 for a longer time. My LG3 was used 10 Years with Lineage and my LG5 only few Years.

Happy first Birth Day L5!

Edit: If you have to use the file browser from gnome to select a folder or a location where to save. The Terminal Layout is helpful too. If the Gnome File Browser open, you can switch to the Terminal Keyboad Layout and use the layout with the arrow keys to navigate to a folder, open it by switch the view with alphabeth and enter… and use enter to open some marked folder. Which can not be archived by touch right now. Just to give you some hints. Understanding usual Linux/Unix Systems is a big step forward to use computers of all kind.

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Yes. They make M.2 SSDs in the 2230 module size The Steam Deck and other gaming handhelds (ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, MSI Claw) uses this size drive. They are more expensive at higher capacities, but available.

That said, I very much doubt that one could swap the M.2 slot used for the WiFi/BT with a storage drive without some hardware changes, even if the card fits. At the very least, the firmware would probably need to be updated to account for the different card type.

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Most likely not.

The PCIe pins may not even be connected to the M.2 slot. Check the schematics if this is important to you.

The M.2 slot keying may be wrong.

PCIe may also open up the potential for a security compromise (the point being that the card that is currently in the slot runs untrusted, unauditable, blackbox code and hence must be denied unrestricted access to main memory).

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So, in my current day to day life it’s common that one battery is enough since they last probably 4 hours or something (highly dependent on use). If I’m going on a longer trip I might throw one or two batteries in my pocket. If I’m traveling on a plane or train, I take them all.

The chargers i am using were $10 amazon junk. Originally I had 3 chargers since I had 4 batteries, but more recently two of them broke and I just have 1 charger and 1 spare librem 5 that I am using as a charger, which is admittedly quite silly.

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I had been thinking that maybe I would take the 2 broken chargers and frankenstein them together into 1 working charger but generally they were probably not designed to be user-disassembled and are just cheap junk. So a better charger might be smart. But they really work. I just put the battery in there and slide the little metal slider to connect to positive and negative, and it charges up the battery. It charges a little bit slower than the battery does inside of a Llibrem 5 but that’s probably OK and honestly might be good for safety, I don’t know.

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Thanks, I’ll look into getting one. Unfortunately I live outside the US and I only had the foresight to buy one extra battery.

I don’t know how to get another one (other than buying another phone) unfortunately.

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I only see 2 pins, so it does not communicate with the chip on the battery or monitor its temperature.

There are multiple Kastor chargers on amazon and it is difficult to tell which one you have. Would you mind sharing the ASIN for it? (As far as I know, no one else has mentioned another charger that works with a Librem 5 battery.)

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You can send your Librem 5 to Purism, then they can send it back with extra batteries to satisfy IATA requirements.

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Preferably sent to Purism with the battery removed so that one battery could be included inside and one stuffed into the box. It’s just a workaround though. Hopefully one day the actual problem gets solved.

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OK - I am impressed with the number and quality of responses. I needed to use my phone and had left the SIM in the S10 until last night when I determined I would throw it back in the L5 and see if I can try some of the suggestions.

The Phone still didn’t work with the mic and there were updates to apply. I applied the updates and not the phone will not boot, it lets me enter the decryption pass phrase, then get stuck in a loop where the screen is grey for a while, goes dark, the grey again for a while.

I was looking for instructions on doing a “Factory Reset” but had no joy finding instructions.

Would that be my next step to try or is there something else I can try there?

I am keen to get that SIM out of the SA10 again…

Please and thanks

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There is no “factory reset” as such. You’ll have to reinstall the OS, aka “reflash” it. This will wipe everything from your device and make a fresh install.

Instructions, courtesy of @FranklyFlawless : Librem 5 out of memory on Boot partition - #26 by FranklyFlawless

If you’re not running a recent GNU/Linux Debian derivative on your computer, you’ll also need to make a bootable/live USB of one of those, boot into it on your computer, then complete the process of reflashing. (It won’t require actually installing anything on your computer, if you’re using the live USB.)

If you are running a Linux distro already, see if the package uuu is available in the repository, with sudo apt install uuu. If it works, then you can proceed. If not, then the live USB is probably the way to go, even if you’re already running a Linux distro.

Presumably, you tried rebooting and that didn’t correct it?
And the battery had adequate charge?

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Thanks for this.

Indeed. Now you mention it, I had noticed at boot messages that /boot was running out of space. On my Ubuntu boxes I use apt autoremove - maybe I should have tried that on the L5, but now I can’t get to shell.

Thank you for that link, I’ll try it tonight.

Most appreciated.

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Keep us informed in this thread if you require any technical support.