I’ll be debugging this more today. But I pulled out my Pocket Reform over the weekend and did a much overdue apt-get upgrade and then apt-get dist-upgrade and rebooted.
Suddenly the laptop boots but… the screen flashes purple but then doesn’t actually turn on! However I can tell it boots because the keyboard driver turns on and I can do the keyboard color rave while moving around the trackball. I can’t get an external monitor to boot either, but it’s probably stuck at the encryption passphrase bit.
I did let apt blow away a config file (some .toml thing) I think without looking at what the change was. I wonder if that was related.
Thankfully it’s easy enough to boot off a microsd card I understand so I’m going to try that next! I thought I would post this here though in case anyone knew anything about what might cause this or if they ran into this themselves, maybe it will be helpful to see someone else experience and try to fix it.
Hm… nope! I tried flashing another microsd card with the recovery image. Same problem: screen flashes purple and presumably it’s booting, but I don’t see anything.
Out of a weird curiosity I put a microsd card that didn’t have a system image on it and tried booting it and there was no purple flash, no keyboard rave effect possible, so I really do think it’s booting part of the way on the other two microsd cards. Not sure what’s happening. This literally happened after a dist-upgrade so I’m not sure why that would mess things up for a fresh image too.
Well, I tried unseating and reseating the display cable, and I tried hooking things up to an HDMI monitor… no dice. (Strangely the HDMI monitor recognizes it has turned on, but nothing displays!)
At this point MNT staff suggested, the device is under warranty, send it in, so I’m gonna do that!
I’m getting the same exact issue. It started before I did a recent apt upgrade – I’m using the script someone shared here that turns off the display after 5 minutes, and it started just not waking back up.
Around this time, I also started seeing an error message as I was properly shutting down that said something about dbus (maybe?) not being able to communicate with the display.
Then, the display started failing to turn on on the first boot, but would work after a hard shutdown and booting again. That worked for two sessions, and now the display isn’t turning on at all. Sometimes I’m getting a quick flash of the screen, then just nothing.
Is the best route to just send it in at this point?
Before booting, I warmed the machine up externally with a space heater. I don’t know if temperature is the cause of course, but especially with the heat-related wi-fi issues, I thought maybe extreme cold could be causing this (I had been walking around in sub-freezing temps before trying to boot).
Looking at the logs, all failed attempts to boot got to this stage, and never progressed – even after letting it sit for several minutes:
Jan 09 12:50:02 host systemd[1]: NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 09 12:50:14 host systemd[1]: systemd-hostnamed.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 09 12:50:17 host systemd[1]: blueman-mechanism.service: Deactivated successfully.
Jan 09 12:50:17 host systemd[1]: blueman-mechanism.service: Consumed 1.401s CPU time, 46.8M memory peak.
However now, it went on to this stage, and the display came to life and booted quickly:
Jan 10 10:57:59 host sudo[1972]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root(uid=0) by guy(uid=1000)
Jan 10 10:57:59 host sudo[1972]: guy : TTY=pts/0 ; PWD=/home/guy ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/journalctl -r
Fingers crossed it continues to boot but I’ll be sure to use it in warmer spaces going forward.
I’m facing kinda the same issue. No purple flash though but I can see the screen turns on and off really quick and then nothing happens. The keyboard is alive though.
I thought I’d update: @minute looked at it and discovered it was an issue with the imx8mp module, possibly a one-off thing. I was planning on looking at replacing the module eventually anyway so while replacing with another imx8mp was offered, I just ordered a fresh rk3588 module instead!
Excited to have a working Pocket Reform again soon
@akiel do you still have this issue, with imx8mp? If so, we can send you a different i.MX8MP SoM to see if it makes a difference, and in general we can offer warranty inspection (at support@mntre.com).
I’m still having problems. I have managed to “debug” a bit the issue.
I managed to turn it on again by disconnecting the SSD and it boots to the error message complaining about the missing device. If I then turn it off and insert the SSD back it will boot correctly but exactly once. Restarting leads to the same odd behavior.
Actually, scratch that. I did the trick once more to update the system and now it’s consistently not turning on again. @minute I do not know if switching the module would help. What do you think?
but I’ll be sure to use it in warmer spaces going forward.