I got my Librem 5 a year or two ago (I want to say it was the Evergreen batch?), and wifi never really worked reliably. I might restart the phone and wifi then starts working for a while (automatically connects to my network), then after a bit it stops working in the sense that the wifi icon gets greyed out and the phone behaves as if it has no wifi hardware, and commands such as nmcli dev wifi connect ... yield an error saying “No Wi-Fi device found.”
I just took the phone out of the drawer after about a year to try to work on this issue but I can’t seem to make any progress. The kill switch is off, my timezone is set properly, and occasionally the wifi appears enabled and connects to my network. But most of the time it doesn’t work, as if the wifi hardware is not detected.
It seems to be worse now than it was a year or two ago when I first tried it. I just updated the software on the phone and tried rebooting a couple of times, but can’t seem to get wifi enabled.
I tried running various mmcli diagnostic commands that I found on forums but I didn’t find anything that helped. Without wifi the device is unusable for me. Is there anyone who can help me to troubleshoot this? The only lead I found that might be relevant is that when I run mmcli -m 0 to get the modem status it says that the state is “failed” with reason “sim-missing”. Indeed I do not have a sim card in the phone, but I think that shouldn’t stop the wifi from working (and indeed the wifi works occasionally as I mentioned).
How did you do that ?? given that the WiFi is apparently unstable. Two years of updates would be a truckload !
It may be a good idea to shutdown, kill the WiFi, boot up, wait for everything to finish in the boot … then unkill the WiFi.
Is Bluetooth working (when the WiFi is not killed)? at least visible as active on the phone? working (if you have any Bluetooth devices to test with)?
I think you need to get more definite than that. I don’t know how to distinguish the batches though.
Once you have established definitely that you have an Evergreen device, one thing to consider is whether you should start again and flash with the Byzantium release. If you really haven’t done anything with it for a year or two, there perhaps isn’t anything worthwhile on it, so maybe it’s OK to blow it away and install from scratch, starting with the latest release.
I think that in the early days there were some weird interactions between mobile-up and WiFi-up. I haven’t seen that for a while though.
Are you able to put in a valid SIM (temporarily) in order to eliminate (or confirm) this as a possible source of problem?
mmcli is for the Modem Manager i.e. for the cellular modem.
Not to be confused with nmcli, which is for the Network Manager i.e. for any network connection (could be data over the cellular modem, could be WiFi).
Having a defective wifi/bluetooth card is not out of the question. It turns out that my card was bad from the beginning, and after a back-and-forth with Purism support, they sent me a replacement card which worked.
At this stage though, with the WiFi device disappearing but sometimes being present, I think more likely to be software. I think I remember problems from the early days when Bluetooth would be active and working but WiFi would be difficult to get working.
Thanks all for the replies; frustratingly (though I guess I’m not complaining) the wifi has been working perfectly all day today without a single issue. What I’m now observing is that each time I reboot the device the wifi and bluetooth are unavailable, as if the hardware doesn’t exist. Then I toggle the wifi/bluetooth kill switch off and then on again, then they come online and connect. I’ve reboot the phone twice in the last day and both times that worked.
So I guess I’ll wait and see how things go.
For posterity, I measured the length of the device and it is 153mm, so I guess that means it is an Evergreen batch according to what amarok says.
It may be a good idea to shutdown, kill the WiFi, boot up, wait for everything to finish in the boot … then unkill the WiFi.
That seems to have worked, in the sense that when I kill the wifi switch then unkill it seems to come back on (at least that is what’s happening today).
Is Bluetooth working (when the WiFi is not killed)? at least visible as active on the phone? working (if you have any Bluetooth devices to test with)?
When the wifi is not working I observe that the bluetooth is also not working. But now they are both working.