Advanced Topics

A computer is a complex system where hardware and software interact, and sometimes, unpredicted problems may appear. Should you experience issues with MNT Reform Next, please use our online troubleshooting guides via https://support.mnt.re. If your issue isn’t listed you can submit a custom message to us via the same link.

Updating the Firmware

If there’s trouble related to charging or power, or the functionality of the keyboard and trackpad, you should try to update the System Controller Firmware and the Keyboard Firmware.

The recommended way to do this is using the GNOME Firmware application, or fwupdmgr update. If you’re unsure, refer to https://community.mnt.re and https://support.mnt.re.

For reference, the source code of the firmware is here:

Rescue Shell and Reform-Check

The reform-tools package includes the rescue-shell tool that is meant to be run from a fresh System Image flashed to MicroSD card or USB stick (refer to Flashing the System Image in the chapter Software). Once your MicroSD/USB system has booted, complete the Setup Wizard with dummy data, launch a terminal and run sudo rescue-shell. It will attempt to mount your existing system on eMMC/SSD and give you a root shell there, where you can repair your system or copy out important data. You can also run reform-check inside this shell to get some automated diagnostics.

Serial Console

If you need to do low-level console debugging, for example to see boot logs when nothing is printed on the screen, MNT Reform Next features a convenient built-in UART-to-USB function on the USB-C port normally used for charging (on the left side of the laptop). You can enable this feature by going to the System Control submenu in the OLED menu and selecting USB function: UART.

Then, connect another computer to the USB-C port on the left side and use a terminal program such as tio to interact with the console:

# See table for baud rate
tio /dev/ttyUSB0 -b 1500000

Please note that kernel output could be suppressed by kernel parameters. Override these parameters in u-boot by interrupting it’s automatic boot with a keypress. Then use setenv:

setenv bootargs keep_bootcon earlycon
boot