My purely debian-family Linux Chromebook has been acting weird lately. I suspect that maybe when I replaced the internal battery a while ago, some of the connections inside might not have been put back properly because it was very difficult to reassemble. I was very careful but totally possible I made an error because I’m not too experienced with that. All the little ribbons and clips were so fiddly.
Is there a way to monitor for loose connections from the terminal? Some kind of log entries that would be clues? I just am looking for the basic info here, don’t feel anything is too obvious!
Problems I’m having are like pauses of unresponsiveness, and a lot of confusion about the power (battery vs ac, full vs empty, plugged vs unplugged). Bluetooth has become less reliable also. Generalized poltergeist type behavior.
Technically no. No software could ever detect a bad connection unless the spec has a sense method for every data line before communicating. And even then, it would still be inconclusive. But the result of bad/intermittent connection is indeed usually quite severe, the sign can be negligible at first tho. Off spec timing, bit flip, occasional garbled data, all of which could stall or halt the system in weird ways. It doesn’t hurt to do a reassembly.
‘acting weird’ is not enough of information. Try to write down everything that is happening without guessing the cause at first.
Is there a way to monitor for loose connections from the terminal?
The systemd journal does the monitoring for you.
Just enter
journalctl -bfor this boot, locate relevant time spans. Maybe readman journalctlto figure out how to find what you’re looking for.There’s also
dmesgwhich shows you the kernel’s ring buffer. But I find most if not all entries in the journal as well and if I’m not mistaken “ring buffer” means that new entries overwrite old entries.If you can reproduce the problem, start
journalctl -fordmesg -wfirst, then reproduce. That should be helpful.Technically, anything is possible, but I think you’ll encounter more catastrophic failures if you have loose connections.
Why not just disassemble and double check the connections? Ruling it out early will save time while debugging the software side.
I thought everything was good when I out it together. I don’t know how to do a better job. It was very difficult to put back together so I could just make it worse with another attempt. If it is possible to do some reconnaissance in advance then I will prefer that.
You could take a look at the kernel log by running the
dmesg. This might give you some clues if some drivers are encountering issues.As another commenter said, bad battery seems likely for the charge level symptoms. For the bluetooth, it might be the antenna that got disconnected or severed.
Easiest to check by opening it up again. But if you’re afraid of doing more damage you could take it to a confident friend or some repair shop.
So I would be looking for messages about drivers?
Would that indicate a hardware problem or that I have the wrong drivers? I don’t understand what you mean.
Could indicate a hardware problem or software bug in the driver, that could have been introduced in a recent update. Could also indicate nothing but it’s worth looking at.
Edit: I meant “running the
dmesgcommand”.
Man, my whole life seems like loose internal connections.
You might have a bad “new” battery; more so likely if it’s a third party battery. Not that all third party batteries are bad or that you shouldn’t use one- this one might just be bad.
How do you tell?
The original battery got spicy so it had to go.
I think there is some problem with the USB power input because it behaved weird with the old battery, I had hoped replacing would solve it.
