Well I guess it had to happen eventually, with an already cracked screen that was still perfectly usable I managed to lose grip of the phone and dropped it again which totally broke the screen, bad enough that even using a usb-c dock to output to a monitor and using a keyboard to login (while doable) is unusable due to phantom touch input that opens applications at random and types non-stop.
I have already ordered a new screen, and disassembled the phone to remove the broken one. I was curious if the phone will still boot normally without detecting the normal display, since it will take a while to get the new one I could at least re-assemble everything else and use it as a desk phone in the meantime.
Also, while I have the phone in pieces I had to note that the chassis is really crumbling now, the plastic around the screw holes of the first secured piece to remove were already broken or cracking, 2 tiny brass bits that I’m really not sure about just fell right out, at some point it may just not hold together any longer and I’ll have to put it into a new housing anyway.
Good question. Beyond my expertise but I think the touch input is separate from the display. So it may be possible to disable (disconnect?) them independently. Probably best to ask Purism Support about that.
The second thread you linked did explain what those brass pins are, thank you. I spend a good while looking over the board and couldn’t decipher what they came from. While I’m pretty sure the touch and display is handled over a single cable I’d have to check the schematics to verify. I will test later today to see if the device boots properly without it, after I apply fresh thermal paste (the stock paste was quite crusty), and reassemble.
wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --off will turn the internal screen off, including the touch controller. You can execute that through ssh or USB serial console.
Okay can confirm the device boots without it’s display attached, doesn’t output to a secondary display during boot though, just guessing when it prompted for the password it was able to finish booting and then starts outputting to the secondary, although it still trying to output to the non-existent display so it doesn’t show anything but wallpaper on the secondary.
So now my question is, is there a keybind to launch the terminal? I can at least input commands blind if I know it’s open and disable the default.
Ah, I must have missed that in the documentation, so I installed picocom to my desktop and attempted to access it but after plugging in the phone, /dev/ttyACM0 does not show up at all.
Tried over the usb dock, regular usb-c cable I used to charge it, and the usb-c cable that shipped with the phone, it’s just not working. So I don’t know, was there something that had to be enabled on the librem first?
Phone doesn’t show up under lsusb either. No change to that output or change to /dev unplugging it and plugging it in, phone plays the noise as it connects and starts charging but that’s it.
Plugged in a network cable to the usb hub and it looks like I can ping it, that will only continue to work as long as the battery is above a certain percentage because apparently I can either only charge the phone or have the hub work. I’m assuming logind is a default daemon on this. To why the device still doesn’t show up on my desktop I have to assume I’m missing some module that should be loaded for it to detect the librem5, as nothing in dmesg even shows up when it’s connected. As a last resort I tried to use usb-A to usb-C cable and got nothing (I did try different swapping the usb-c orientation in case it mattered, all I get is power charging, the cable is advertised for data as well).
I did also try blindly opening applications with the keyboard and using the keybind to switch monitor as listed in another thread (super+shift left|right), and keybind to open app launcher and trying to switch it over did nothing. I thought maybe also having a mouse cursor on the secondary monitor would give it “focus” to open applications but that didn’t work. Also tried dropping to TTY with ctrl+alt+F1-12 but that must be disabled since nothing happened.
I loaded a liveusb distro on a laptop to see if it could be detected, but the laptop doesn’t detect the librem5 either. I will try pureOS to see if I can get any result.
Okay, no idea where to go from here because not even running pure os byzantium on a laptop can detect it. Charging works but that’s the extent of it. There shouldn’t be any problem with the usb port on the phone, it’s never been damaged and there’s no dirt in it.
The visible external port perhaps but maybe the drop was violent enough to disconnect something inside. Maybe time to send it in for repair and get everything checked out / fixed.
Although I think it’s pretty unlikely that only data would be disabled if it broke, that seems on par with my luck recently. I would still find it weird though, if it’s able to communicate video and network over usb-c still it doesn’t make sense that just the virtual serial port doesn’t work. I’ll have the new screen in a couple of days but I guess I’ll also get a usb-serial cable in case this happens again, would have been much quicker to just solder that on and been done with it. Once it’s fixed I’ll have to check why the virtual port wasn’t showing.
