Selling a Librem 5 - Should I reflash?

Hardware Librem 5
1

Hi there,

I have a brand-new Librem 5 that I’m looking to sell on eBay. Unfortunately, the last time I tried to sell it, the buyer returned it, citing bugginess and various graphics issues. Due to the nature of eBay, I had no choice but to refund him.

Now that I’ve got the phone back, I noticed that certain websites (like ChatGPT) weren’t loading on it (this is one of the screenshots he sent me of the device not working as intended). I updated it via terminal, and now it seems to be running much better, websites load properly, etc.

I notice it is still someone’s glitchy sometimes; yesterday, the settings app was stuck and wouldn’t allow me to scroll through it, just a frozen screen.

Should I reflash it before I sell, or is there anything else I should run or do to improve its reliability? I plan on placing a disclaimer on my listing that the device is for technical-minded people who are willing to tinker only.

Thanks in advance

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As a matter of course the seller should reflash before selling and the buyer should reflash after buying (and both parties should be using the encrypted variant).

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For security purposes? In this case, no person data was ever on the phone, should’ve mentioned that sorry. It’s basically open box/new, never used. Connected to WiFi and tested a few websites and that was it.

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For functional purposes.

5

OK, thanks. I have an ARM based Mac - will ARM based Debian VM work to complete the flashing process? Or should I run the VM on a Windows x86 computer?

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I would not know as I do not possess any Apple silicon hardware nor Windows devices.

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That right there.

That’s your WiFi Pre-Shared Key (passphrase) stored in plain text - which you would want to erase before sale.

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It should do. The only real requirement is a working uuu command. Beyond that, if you want to run the whole script, working Python. So ARM or x86 shouldn’t matter. I believe that some people have reflashed a phone from another phone, which is of course ARM.

The tricky bit might be “VM”, not “ARM” - since if you run a VM, the VM has to have access to the USB device i.e. to the phone connected to the host computer via USB.

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FWIW uuu works natively on macOS (and even Windows), so a determined power user should be able to get it to work without any VMs. It’s just not a configuration supported by Purism (I don’t think anyone there uses macOS or Windows :stuck_out_tongue: )

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Purism has many faults but at least there is some baseline decency: no macOS or Windows :grin:

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Can you be sure the buyer didn’t install anything?

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Yeah, fair point. I will reflash it.

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You even can create a Linux usb system (you can create it via Librem 5, if you have a USB-C-USB-A adapter) and flash it from the usb-system from another computer.

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