Well, if you want some fun, USB ethernet dongle in the bottom of the phone and then you can route traffic for test purposes. (The default hotspot creation logic might not work though and would need adjustment so that it understands it is routing from the WiFi hotspot to the ethernet rather than from the WiFi hotspot to the cellular modem.)
Even without routing, you can definitely test the WiFi hotspot itself e.g. if you spin up a server on the Librem 5 itself (any server, doesn’t really matter what).
All of the devices that I tried seem to fail early in the hotspot connection process. dmesg does not show anything on my Linux laptop. So it may or may not be getting to that routing issue. The QR code that PureOS shows worked on my Android device, and it saw it as a WiFi 6 device. But it never established a connection. So, maybe do not run out and buy this for a hotspot. But it is only a $29 experiment, plus time for finding and figuring out how to load the firmware. OpenWRT might handle this card better though.
Back to the WiFi connectivity stability issue, the only reason why this card may be running smoothly (as a WiFi client) is because PureOS may not be activating any power savings modes on it. I imagine that requires tweaking for each card. The same stability might be achieved with the bundled WiFi card with the right settings (and extra power consumption).
Without a lot of other peripherals and power hungry hubs, with a 5000mAh such battery it may easily get away without enabling power saving modes at all
Wow. That was good timing. I updated the OS and rechecked that I had the same problem. I did.
debian/output$ sudo dpkg --force-depends -i *.deb
dpkg: libnm-dev:arm64: dependency problems, but configuring anyway as you requested:
libnm-dev:arm64 depends on libglib2.0-dev; however:
Package libglib2.0-dev is not installed.
I am probably going to wipe this OS, so I am not too concerned with breaking apt. But other people should be more careful. My recommendation is to wait for this to be available as a standard update. Without restarting, I checked the hotspot, and it worked! While I have no Internet without a SIM card in it, I was able to ssh into it with its 10.x.x.1 IP address. So, with this, I could have a fairly nice hotspot, provided that I use it sparingly or plugged in. My Android device still sees it as a WiFi 6 access point.
On Ubuntu I have a file in /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d that sets wifi.powersave = 2 because, with the WiFi card that I have in that particular computer, power save stuffs up royally. (2 means disable, 3 means enable.) There is probably an equivalent nmcli incantation if you want to change it dynamically. (I just want to turn if off! permanently.)
That’s your problem. You never want to do that unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
These packages should be installable with no dependency issues on an up-to-date byzantium system though. All you need is network-manager and libnm0, the rest only matters if you had them installed before.
BTW. You can use apt instead of dpkg to install deb files to let it handle dependencies for you.
It’s already disabled by default for WiFi because of UAPSD issues on Redpine cards. For modem, you can disable autosuspend for USB devices in sysfs. I don’t recommend doing that unless you’re in need for a portable hand heater.
Could the power management topic be a topic that impacts the topic of performance of docking stations / HDMI signal? Because at the end of the day a USB-C docking station is also a USB device.
