Major Issues after "OS Update" on Librem 5

Hardware Librem 5
34

So to elaborate on that one:

  1. If you had SSH access configured, it should be easy - WiFi should still work, and you should be able to ssh to your phone as usual in order to perform the recovery.
  2. If you had no SSH access configured, but you have a USB keyboard around, you can plug it in (either via hub or USB-A to C adapter) and press Ctrl+Alt+F2. You should then see a login screen where you can login (login: purism; password: your password used on the lockscreen) and perform the recovery from there.
  3. If you have neither SSH access nor USB keyboard, you can use Jumpdrive to access your phone’s system partition. Then edit the file usr/share/gnome-session/sessions/phosh.session and change sm.puri.OSK0 to sm.puri.Squeekboard (be careful not to change anything else, like the punctuation around). This should let your phone boot to graphical (although degraded) session and let you perform recovery steps in the regular terminal app.

Unfortunately. connection over USB won’t work. Both serial over USB and Ethernet over USB is configured by packages from librem5-base, which got removed, so no USB gadget gets exposed.

Once you have access to the phone’s shell, in order to recover your system to a fully working state do:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install librem5-gnome

In case it fails to resolve the dependencies (and only then!), do this instead:

sudo apt install librem5-gnome linux-image-librem5/byzantium linux-image-6.3.0-1-librem5-

This should bring your phone back to its feet without having to reflash. Just make sure not to update with PureOS Store again until the issue is resolved.

10 Likes