Issues flashing L5 with M1 MacBook

Librem Phones (Librem 5)
1

Hi there,

TLDR: I am trying to get points on how to flash the Librem 5 using an M1 Macbook - or confirmation that its not possible.

Background:
This week I received a Librem 5. I am guessing its an evergreen - it says L5v1-05.
After booting I tried updating the phone using the PureOS store, which failed due to some missing dependencies. The internet told me to run sudo apt update and sudo apt upgrade. When I rebooted the phone it was bricked - it seems like its stuck in a boot loop (green LED, vibrating when it starts) and seemingly restarting every ~20 seconds.

I found the Reflashing guide. The related blog entry mentions to use a “64-bit x86 computer running PureOS”.

I spun up a VM (using UTM) and set it to x86_64, hoping the virtualization will work… (at least the PureOS runs)

Currently stuck at:
The flashing process seems to just get stuck when running ./scripts/librem5-flash-image. It downloads the image and finds the phone, but then gets stuck running uuu. Eventually the red LED turns orange and off within 5 minutes. There is no progress bar.

uuu (Universal Update Utility) for nxp imx chips -- lib1.4.77

Success 0    Failure 0

When I run uuu -V cache/flash_librem5r4.lst manually it shows, but also does not advance:

Wait for Known USB Device Appear...
>Start Cmd:CFG: SDP: -chip MX8MQ -compatible MX8MQ -vid 0x316d -pid 0x4c05
>Okay (0.002s)

The guide does not indicate how long the flashing should take etc. but I am guessing the phone just turns off since the LED turns off.

Happy for any pointers at what to try next.

2

I actually was able to flash my Librem using my Raspberry pi 4. I used the current 64bit image: 2022-04-04-raspios-bullseye-arm64-lite.img and followed the exact same steps that are outlined in the guide.

Worked like a charm!

What made my life easier was to:

  1. Connect the phone in boot mode
  2. Start the ./scripts/librem5-flash-image.

(using ./scripts/librem5-flash-image --dir <some directory> was a big help to cache the image locally and try a couple of ways to connect the phone).

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