I am abroad, so I was relying heavily on Wi-Fi. My Librem 5 is on the stock configuration. No Crimson shenanigans.
Three days ago, the PureOS Store offered me to upgrade the system. I accept it and, after reboot, Wifi was gone. Nothing on dmesg, nothing on lspci. It is like the card not there at all.
I purchased a few months ago via a friend who lives in the US a Sparklan card and I should meet him in a few days to swap cards and test. Otherwise, any suggestions on what I could try?
Some people have complained recently about the PureOS store not being up to date, I wonder if it could have offered you the wrong update? If you have a backup stored in your phone you could try restoring to an earlier edition of the software and assuming it works and you get your wifi back you could type in āāsudo apt upgradeāā into the terminal.
Edit: It is really cool that you have a redpine, I donāt know anyone who doesnāt have the evergreen.
I am on the evergreen. Redpine is the wireless card, no? (I may be brainfarting due to jet lag)
Calling apt upgrade got me a few new packages but no new kernel. And wifi still gone. Super weird.
Any other thoughts? I donāt have too much time to dig into this on my own but I hope the other card will do. Awful timing. I only use wifi when I am out of the EU. =)
I could be brainfarting as well, I believe you should have 818 tools in your app list. You could try reinstalling the modem software if you canāt restore a backed up image and see if that works.
Edit: I just know all the old Librem 5s are named after trees. Aspen, birch, dogwood, chestnut, etc.
This may or may not help: open the terminal, run sudo dmesg --follow and start toggling the WiFi killswitch back and forth. Observe the console - if some redpine things start to show up there, stop toggling and wait for the WiFi device to show up.
Also, please provide the exact kernel version (uname -a). Specifying 6.6.0-1 tells us āa version from somewhere between 2023 and nowā
Personally, when I am away, I generally avoid applying updates (not specific to Librem 5 or even to Linux in general - that would be my universal advice from having been burned enough times).
@dos:
Linux pureos 6.6.0-1-librem5 #2 SMP PREEMPT 6.6.92pureos1~byz1 2025-06-02 06:49:09 UTC aarch64 GNU/Linux
Playing with the toggle switch brought me to this outcome (probably lockdown mode):
Modem switch on, toggling the wifi switch: Nothing happens. Absolutely nothing.
Modem switch off, toggling the wifi switch:
from off to on: irq: type mismatch, failed to map hwirq-7 for gpio@30220000!
from on to off: vcnl4000 1-0060: Failed to power down (-ENXIO)
Mic/camera toggle on, playing with the wifi: nothing happens.
So it seems to me that it is sending power to the card, because it goes into lockdown mode (I assume). But thereās nothing in the logs. Before the update, the wifi toggle had been on for a few days continuously.
I downgraded to .83 and nothing. This is just bizarre or an incredible coincidence with the card going belly up. =)
@irvinewade:
Iāll be abroad for 3 months, so, yea. =)
Thank you both. I will leave the phone off the whole night and wait for a miracle. =))
Leave the other switches alone, just toggle the WiFi one. On one of my devices I sometimes need to toggle it back and forth a dozen or two times for the Redpine card to register.
I also experience problems with the Redpine card not being detected. I could not yet figure out how exactly I can get it back. Iāve the impression that shutting down the phone for some time (maybe around 15 minutes) and then starting again brings it mostly back. Just an immediate reboot does often not work, using the hardware kill switches usually also does not work. I experience this with Crimson.
Unfortunately, I do not remember. It happens on my non-daily L5, which I do not use that often. I try to do some testing with a pre 6.6.83pureos1 kernel and the current version.
Best to test on 6.6.83pureos1 to minimize influence of other changes. 6.6.83pureos2 was the first one to include a change that Iām interested in knowing whether it influenced it.
I did a little experiment with: kernel 6.6.92pureos1~cri1
Preliminary result: To bring back the WiFi: Disconnect the L5 from the charger. Power the L5 off (via top right screen button Power Offā¦), wait for 5 minutes, power on the L5 with the physical power button. L5 boots and WiFi module is back.
Could the behavior be temperature related?
I will do some more tests, with lower waiting times, and I will register the temperatures a bit. Also with other kernels if I can figure out how to install them.
I had also the suspicion that the redpine card (Librem 5 was received 2021) was not detected when rebooting āwarmā. It had happened frequently after upgrades which made the phone noticable warmer. After having the sparklan card sitiing in my drawer for a long time I decided to swap it a few weeks ago. Since then I have not experienced this isue anymore (running Byzantium).
Best to test on 6.6.83pureos1 to minimize influence of other changes. 6.6.83pureos2 was the first one to include a change that Iām interested in knowing whether it influenced it.
Where can I find the packages of 6.6.83pureos1~byz ?
The pipeline failed back then, so there are no deb files there. And I could not find it anywhere.
I only found the deb files of 6.6.83pureos2~byz, which I installed now for the time being.
