How to Boot VenusOS From Stored Firmware using SSH Command Line?

Modifications
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1

VRM connection stopped working with #153 error (v3.42) and despite numerous reboots, which have worked in the past, connection error remained.

One solution from this forum suggested to downgrade VenusOS from v3.42 which I did using the stored previous version (v3.13).

This resolved the #153 connection error however, Remote Console displays a blank menu.

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Note that SSH still allows access to the command line.

I suspect that some display engine was updated after v3.13 which has not been reinstalled by the downgrade from v3.42.

I would rather not do a full reinstall of v3.42 as there are numerous add-ons (Dbus-serialbattery, Package Manager & packages) which do require an awful lot of configuration.

Preferred solution is get access to v3.13 Remote Console & upgrade to v3.42 or higher in situ (without creating another SD card) but this is not possible because of blank Remote Console.

The only other alternative is to use SSH to revert to the stored v3.42, access functioning Remote Console, reassess the #153 connection error & probably upgrade to latest VenusOS.

But how?

Does anyone know the steps involved? Which files need moving/editing?

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There are a number of command line scripts that can manage the firmware:

/opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/scan-versions.sh

reports the current firmware version and the backup version.

/opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/set-version.sh 2

then can be used to switch to the backup firmware. The system will reboot after running the script.

/opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/set-swu-feed.sh

can be used to select release or candidate firmware

/opt/victronenergy/swupdate-scripts/check-updates.sh -update -force

can be used to redownload and install the firmware (select the feed first if you want to change that)

Note that check-updates.sh will upgrade you to the latest version. It looks like there are options to select a specific version to install but I haven’t played with that.

Before you do a firmware update, make sure you have ssh keys enabled. This will bypass the need to set a password before using ssh.

The likely cause of the white screen is one of the third-party mods you are running. It is possible one of them is not compatible with v3.13. I would suggest you uninstall all your packages from the command line or use the blind uninstall procedure from the SetupHelper ReadMe file, then use the swupdate-scripts to install a fresh version of the firmware and not have any third party mods installed. Then install SetupHelper from the command line, then one at a time each of the packages you had installed previously. If you encounter problems (white screen, or your original VRM problem) uninstall the last package and look for the reason.

Logs can be helpful. The gui log might indicate the corrupted file and point to the package that modified it.

Logs are in /data/log where you will find directories for each service. Within each you will find a set of 5 log files, current being the most recent.

Any package that utilizes SetupHelper utilities will log to /data/log/PackageManager/current during install/uninstall operations. PackageManager logs there also if course.