I have a Pi5 in sunfounder case (in fact 2 Pi5) and everything was running fine until I decided to update via software. Running Ubuntu 26.04 KDE. NVME 500G. Linux crashed and could not access command line. Reinstalled Ubuntu and everything again was working fine until I installed pironman5 (curl -sSL “https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sunfounder/pironman5/v1/install.sh” | sudo bash -s – --pipower5). Linux crashed and I cannot access command line. Interestingly if I do not login to desktop and stay on KDE login page I can access via dashboard. I login, see the desktop for 10 seconds and then crash. When crashing there are are over 200 red lines …cannot read… Is pironman5 comp with Ubuntu 26.4? (I have not updated the other pi5 pironman). Any suggestions? Thanks
Thank you very much for describing the issue in such detail, and we are truly sorry for the trouble this has caused you. We completely understand how frustrating it is to reinstall the system repeatedly and still run into crashes.
We will test this as soon as possible and reply to you. Thank you for your patience and understanding, and please feel free to contact us at any time.
We recreated your setup (Pi 5 + Pironman 5 + PiPower 5, Ubuntu 26.04, NVMe boot) and have been testing it since yesterday. Three findings so far:
We did find a real bug on our side for Ubuntu: the PWM fan control never actually worked there (it wrote to the wrong cooling device, and that write always failed). A fix is already up for review. It explains why fan-curve settings do nothing on Ubuntu, but it is not what crashes your machine — we also found that our PiPower 5 support can silently drop out after a system upgrade, and we are fixing that too.
On our PiPower 5 we saw the HAT controller hang: I²C communication timed out, battery/power readings became invalid, and only cutting its power brought it back. Could you try a full power-cycle of the PiPower 5 (unplug its input and battery for ~10 s, then power back on) and see whether the crashes continue? That would help us rule this in or out.
There are also Ubuntu-side issues on 26.04.0: on Raspberry Pi 5 apt upgrade can fail (fixed in 26.04.1), and there is a kernel 6.17 problem that can make a Pi 5 unreachable under load. If you can, please update to 26.04.1 and tell us what uname -r reports.
It would also help to know which image you installed and how KDE was set up (there is no official KDE image for the Pi).
Thank you for your patience — we will keep you posted as we narrow this down.