I have used the Librem 5 daily for about two weeks recently, I’m under Mobian Trixie. I used the known trick to solve the problem of LTE connectivity (cf. thread about “LTE connectivity lost very often”).
However, there is still a problem with SMS. Most of my SMS are received with an important delay, sometimes even an hour. When I send an SMS, it often seems to fail, I see a red cross on the bottom right corner in Chatty. The only workaround I’ve found consists in performing a call. Then, I can successfully send an SMS and I receive SMS sent the last hour. Note that this problem didn’t happen with the Pinephone under Mobian, the Pinephone and the Librem 5 don’t use the same modem and the same firmware.
I don’t know whether it’s relevant. I use a SIM card, my mobile operator is Orange France.
What can I do to get some information about this problem? Do you have a better workaround to suggest? I still refuse using another phone. I abandoned Android and I don’t want to look back. Should I upgrade the firmware? Is there a community firmware?
I ave noticed such problems also, not very often but sometimes. Very annoying.
I think the way it works is that the modem has a small internal memory where received SMS messages are kept when they arrive. Then it is the ModemManager service that is responsible for checking if there are new SMS messages and fetching them from the modem. Based on this, my guess is that the communication between ModemManager and the modem sometimes goes wrong so that ModemManager does not understand that there is a new SMS message, then that SMS is still sitting inside the modem until some point later (like when you make a call) when ModemManager finally notices that there is a new SMS.
It should be easy to at least add some ugly hack to make ModemManager periodically check that, for example every 2 minutes, then the delay would at least not be longer than 2 minutes. But I don’n know exactly how, not right now anyway.
EDIT: the above was just me guessing, it could also be that the SMS has not even arrived to the modem yet. That is something we can check by using the mmcli command to list any SMS messages currently available in the modem. Somewhere in this forum there are examples of how to do that.
They are correct. Everything works (more or less, when it does), but sometimes I don’t receive SMS for a long time, and incoming calls don’t work (as if the modem is disconnected), but sometimes they work fine. I described my problems here.
By the way, I’m still investigating. The modem seems to sleep for Internet too, I had to restart the System D service of the network manager (or modem manager) to make it work anew.
Happens to me too, from time to time. My hack is to turn off the hardware switch to cell service and turn it back on. Then all of my text messages show up. Will definitely be happy when that bug is fixed.
Well so far it didn’t seem to do anything other than drain the battery considerably faster and make the phone slightly warm to the touch all the time. I still get missed calls (notified via SMS). Not sure if it made SMS reception any faster, I need to test that still.
Ok. Let me know when you can test that. I’ll probably have to write a bug report and it’s important to know that it’s not specific to Mobian Linux, PureOS Byzantium is concerned too. Please can you tell me which modem firmware you use? We’ll be more legitimate to report a bug if we upgrade the software stack as much as possible.
I tried MMS today and they work, no delays but I have the message duplication problem with both SMS and MMS.
When sending SMS, sometimes duplicate or triplicate SMS are sent. The receiver gets the multiple messages, they’re not just duplicated in chatty.
Receiving SMS has a delay up to 1 minute (didn’t test it much, just a couple messages.)
Sending MMS works, but the chat window shows the sent MMS not only as the message that came from me (on the right side) but as an incoming messags from myself (on the left side). So 2 messages with the sent MMS are shown.
Receiving MMS works, I get only one message and can open the attached picture fine.
The bigger problem is still with calls. Incoming calls usually don’t work, the caller gets a “number unavailable” and I get a SMS notification from my provider about a missed call. That happened 3 times in a row when testing today, during which time the notification SMS came in, so the modem wasn’t asleep at least for the SMS, but calls were still unavailable. After I called out (which worked fine) incoming calls started working (at least the 1 time I tried it immediately after the outgoing call).
The audio issue still persists. When cell signal is marginal, call audio will be completely missing from the beginning of the call or will cut out in the middle and not come back. Even the dial tone will cut out. If I stand in a spot that I know has good signal and stay still, I get perfect call audio every time. If I start to move, I get audio cut out, probably when I get into orientations or locations where signal is weaker.
I don’t live in a weak signal area. I always have at least 2/4 bars, usually 3/4. Other phones in the same location have no problem getting a strong signal. Data works fast in this location. There’s always 4G.
Yeah, they’re up to date according to all the info I could find here. But I suspect this is partly a modem problem (call audio being signal dependent is very indicative of a modem issue IMO). Maybe newer kernel versions enabled some power saving features that don’t allow the OS to react to modem signals fast enough (or do they poll the modem?). I read that at least for waking up from suspend, the modem outputs a WAKE signal whenever it receives a call or SMS/MMS. Maybe it’s used with normal screen-off idle too, and that’s somehow broken? I don’t know, I’m just guessing. But I used to not have incoming SMS delays some time ago, I think even a year ago. The call audio and message duplication issues were always there however.