When I first received my Librem 5 Evergreen, I was very disappointed to see that I could not connect to wifi during the setup process. I was hoping that the initial phone setup process on a "production batch" would be good enough to make its way through the setup process without issue. To be clear though, I am extremely grateful for Purism and what they're doing, I was just a tad disappointed, though not entirely surprised that the setup process didn't work so great. But hey! We can contribute upstream to fix things up because open source! But for now, here's what I went through to fix it on my device.
One I noticed wifi wasn't going to work after trying a 2.4 and a 5 GHz network to rule that out, I skipped setting up a network connection and continue on to use the phone normally, but still couldn't connect to wifi even manually from the settings menu.
After some troubleshooting, I noticed that the phone's date was set to November 3, 2143... about 123 years into the future. I'm not sure why this was configured this way when shipped. I assume that were I to have first booted the phone with a SIM card, it would have retrieved the time from the cell network or perhaps NTP and it would not have been an issue. However, I booted it with no SIM card plugged in, so it had no way to know the date.
To fix this, you can copy pasta this command in the terminal. It is updated on page load, so it should work as-is.
sudo date -s "2024-04-19 10:38:08 UTC"You don't need to get that accurate to the second, or even the minute or hour to make things work. The NTP service should be able to adjust it slowly in the background to be closer to the current time once connected to wifi.
Last edited: 2020-12-30 04:29:52 UTC
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
by Aaron Ball