I wait as long as required, but once reflashed and re-sratred (avoiding to use word rebooted!) by pressing power button, I get a vibration, LED turns green and than it just stays there, screen doesn’t turn on so really can’t say what’s going on in the back ground.
But than after powering off and on several times, if battery is depleted than it charges when plugged into pwoer source and LED turns amber. Once fully charged, it turns green and stays green mostly if/when plugged into USBC power source. However, sometimes LED goes off after (guess) it is fully charged and it just stays like than all the time, plugged in.
If phone screen would turn on first or immediately as soon as things are done to tell what’s going on, than problem can be identified but only LEDs and their behaviour is confusing as green/amber/red and one status for battery is in or out and another for when it is charging or not.
Also, it is supposed to turn on once plugged in, that is what happened after I received and plugged in and battery was upto a level, it booted on it’s own.
Looks like a empty battery, use BC1.2 charger it leave for charging like 20 minutes, do not use librem 5 charger as i not sure if BC work on this situation.
I see user space (27GB) as free space after jumdrive mounts eMMC (32GB), I have been thinking why it is not shown as formated like EXT4 etc. Can it be an issue? Can format via disk utility?
It looks like the reflashing process didn’t complete or maybe it does the partition resizing on the first boot after a reflash.
Is the phone shutting off after being powered on? You may need to reseat the battery and may want to follow Purism’s recharging procedure in case something may not calibrated correctly. Purism doesn’t charge the devices they ship at 100% so make sure that your device either has enough battery to boot or is charging.
Haven’t used libren 5 charger since day one, using high powered USBC chargers -have a couple- Dell dock USBC charged it first time and at home have used Steam deck USBC charger and one more I guess.
Battery seems to retain charges as once mounted via jumdrive, I often left it that way for hours or more and it seems to stay on. But battery can be probability, but have no spare battery or a separate battery charger. Planned to buy them but it was just day 1 of receiving L5 and this problem.
Could you provide a detailed description of how you’re reflashing your Librem 5? It sounded like you were using uuu directly and not Purism’s reflashing script.
Nope, always flashed via Purism’s script. It downloaded the files, verified them, flashed them and returned sucessfull 1. No confusion about it.
cd librem5-flash-image
sudo ./scripts/librem5-flash-image
cd librem5-flash-image
sudo ./scripts/librem5r4-flash-image
some oprtions added sometimes (as I flashed repeatedly looking for a solution) like
–stable --dist --byzantium --variant --LUKS (or --PLAIN also tried that once) etc.
To save on download and reflash time, the disk image is only as big as it needs to be. The only time that I reflashed though, it did not resize automatically. I had to resize from 4GB to the size of the disk myself (which is no drama). It is possible that this has changed though and more recent disk images will handle the resize (as well as the re-encrypt if using LUKS) on first boot.
Clean flashes should resize the partition, though there is a minor issue in the 2025.07 Crimson image where shows a low disk space warning despite resizing the partition as expected. Based on this information, it seems that it resizes the partition on the first boot.
I got from the eBay seller whom I bought from that it was crowd funded DOGWOOD series Librem 5.
I jumped right back once more into flashing and changed the script with just “librem5r3”; and it did whatever magic was required and L5 is back to life, working perfectly again.
But I learned a lot without any planning to! Eventually I had; (1)resized luks partiton to use all eMMC disk space (jus did it, thought that what difference it makes/can/will make when it is not booting at all), but it still didn’t boot even after resizing; so I reflashed luks and plain versions once again (thinking that this will be last time I will do before giving up on L5), LUKS again shrinked back the root partition to 4GB but PLAIN was okay and used full disk space for root. Even though these two reflashes also didn’t make L5 bootable because (now I know hardway) that these were BYZANTIUM reflashes on a supposedly incompatible DOGWOOD series phone/hardware/software whichever way that combination is defined for) (2)so, than afterwards I erased all partitions on my own hard choice via debian disk utility as a one final attempt and then no partion remained on L5 after that, and was about to flash Postmarket PHOS over to eMMC, whether it might have worked or not, I don’t know, but there was nothing to add to damage I was facing, so why not try!
However, one last time, somehow I got an idea whether if could my L5 be a different version, and so I got that it is DOGWOOD. And than librem5r3 reflash just worked excellent.
I assume that my L5 will remain & retain DOGWOOD and I will not try any new things or revisons of PHOS for a reasonable long time. It will need a bit of courage.
However, if I still need to update the software, should I just do it via terminal only, is the follwoing order is enough and correct for updates? I will not be doing it via Purism Store anyway for now.
now, can I safely restore data backup I did on my working L5 before this saga? wasn’t much in a day of use, may be some apps and I can afford not to have it restored.
Honestly I don’t know what the hardware differences are between the Dogwood batch and the Evergreen batch. Evergreen is what almost everyone, including myself, has.
Looking at the script, you either need to invoke the script by the specific name (specific to the batch name, even though the different scripts are just symbolic links to the only actual script) or use the --board argument to the script.
Note that the tree names (Aspen, … , Dogwood, Evergreen, Fir) are hardware batch names - whereas the colours (amber, byzantium, crimson, dawn) are major operating system version names.
byzantium should be compatible with the Dogwood batch. But there must be some subtle differences in exactly what happens during reflash.
Now that you know how to reflash successfully, you can’t go too far wrong (unless you do something really dubious like try to install Android ). However I wouldn’t go too crazy with updates. Just:
As far as I am concerned, this is never really safe. That is, Linux applications are not typically written with that in mind. It may be simple. It may work. It may not.
If you are careful and you think you understand the internals of a given application (i.e. you know where and how it stores all its settings and data) then you can restore data - but each application has to be considered on a case by case basis, and the application itself needs to be installed first.
But you should complete the update and upgrade first anyway.
Dogwood is still supported by ongoing software updates. You just need to remember to set the right revision if you ever reflash again; other than that, you get the same software as everyone else.
Compared to Evergreen, on Dogwood you get a smaller battery, dimmer flashlight and RGB LED, elevated power consumption and a small chance of rare random lockups due to a hardware bug (which becomes a high chance of frequent lockups on images made for other revisions that don’t contain the workaround). It may also have troubles with acquiring a GPS fix.
On the plus side, the phone’s a bit shorter and lighter Its screen is a bit brighter too IIRC.
). However I wouldn’t go too crazy with updates. Just: