Troubleshooting

PAI won’t boot

Symptom: Machine boots into the host OS, ignores USB.

  1. Check your BIOS boot order — USB must be listed before the internal drive
  2. Try F12 (Dell/Lenovo), F9 (HP), Option (Mac Intel), or F8 (ASUS) at POST to get a one-time boot menu
  3. Verify the USB was flashed correctly — try re-flashing with dd or Rufus
  4. Disable Secure Boot in BIOS if enabled (UEFI → Security → Secure Boot: Disabled)

Symptom: GRUB loads but kernel panics on boot.

Ollama won’t start / no models available

# Check Ollama status
systemctl status ollama

# Restart Ollama
sudo systemctl restart ollama

# Pull a model manually
ollama pull llama3.2

# List available models
ollama list

If Ollama fails to start, check available RAM:

free -h

Models need free RAM to run:

Chat interface not loading

# Check Open WebUI service
systemctl status open-webui

# Restart Open WebUI
sudo systemctl restart open-webui

# Check if port 8080 is listening
ss -tlnp | grep 8080

If Firefox shows “Connection refused”, wait 30 seconds after boot for services to start, then refresh.

Wi-Fi not connecting

# List available networks
nmcli device wifi list

# Connect to a network
nmcli device wifi connect "NetworkName" password "password"

# Check network manager status
systemctl status NetworkManager

Tor (privacy mode) issues

# Enable Tor
sudo pai-privacy on

# Disable Tor
sudo pai-privacy off

# Check Tor status
systemctl status tor

# Verify Tor is routing (should show Tor exit node IP)
curl https://check.torproject.org/api/ip

Persistence not working

# Check persistence status
pai-persistence status

# Manual unlock (if auto-unlock failed)
sudo pai-persistence unlock

# View persistence service logs
journalctl -u pai-persistence

Display issues / blank screen

Performance is very slow

CPU inference is slower than GPU inference. Expected speeds on 8 GB RAM laptop:

To improve performance:

Getting help