After building DIY Reform laptop it is dead (mostly)

MNT Reform
41

When you go to https://mntre.com/ then there is the link “Documentation” at the top which gets you to Documentation: MNT Reform—MNT Research GmbH and then you want the first or the second link on that page depending on whether you prefer the HTML or PDF version, respectively.

It probably said what CPU your unit came with when you bought it. Did it?

if you have the imx8mq then this applies to you: document boot options (#2) · Issues · Reform / reform-handbook · GitLab

Yes, the device would be “on” but since there is nothing to boot from, it would just stay switched on doing nothing.

That depends on your u-boot version but see above link for details.

42

Thanks for those answers. I checked the email order confirmation and the Crowd Supply product page/paragraph, but nowhere could I find the make or model of the CPU. Isn’t there some sort of command (as root) that would tell me what model of CPU is in the DIY Kit?

Thanks again. Have a great day!

.

43

All the specifications for the crowd supply kit are in the campaign page MNT Reform | Crowd Supply

44

You can run this to figure it out:

cat /proc/device-tree/model

In your case, it should say “MNT Reform 2” which would mean that you have the NXP i.MX8MQ.

45

Thanks. That information appears fairly early on in that page, but I was taking my information from the mid-page description of the DIY kit which lacks the detail of the former (this appears just before the section with the title: " MNT Reform Accessories & Optional Add-Ons:".

Is there any program on the laptop O/S that would provide the detailed information such as: “NXP/Freescale i.MX8MQ” or is that detail only available upon physical inspection of the CPU chip itself?

Thanks again. Have a great day!

.

46

On intel machines, you can usually run cat /proc/cpuinfo to find the human readable name of the CPU under “model name”. On many ARM machines, the /proc/cpuinfo output is not very helpful. It’s a bit better when looking at the output of lscpu which for me for example tells me that I have 2 Cortex-A53 and 4 Cortex-A73 cores on my A311D. What does lscpu show for you?

For other applications, output has to be added for each platform over and over again. For example this is how such a request looks like for the cpufetch program: Add support for Freescale i.MX8MP SoC (ARM) / MNT Pocket Reform · Issue #261 · Dr-Noob/cpufetch · GitHub

You can also look at the output of cat /proc/device-tree/compatible.

47

Use fastfetch, neofetch or inxi to get some good system info easily.

In a terminal
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install fastfetch (or one of the other programs)

Then just run the command with fastfetch, neofetch or inxi -F.

2 Likes
48

Thank you, I did not know about inxi but I really like its output! I’ll try to remember that one. I have it installed now.

Unfortunately, none of these programs will print anything about a NXP/Freescale i.MX8MQ CPU.