Marcus's Blog

The latest issue of the Linux Voice magazine features an article about Libreboot X200. Besides that it includes reviews of Libre GNU/Linux distributions as well as instructions on how to liberate existing installations plus a tour on Francis Rowes’ workspace (he is the founder of Libreboot).

Subscribers should already have received this issue. It will be available under CC-BY license, nine months after it has been on sale. An example issue featuring our mentor RMS can be found here.

I received my new BBB and have been able to set it up today. This time I have been especially careful and flashed it successfully. I ran into an issue with the higher resolution display (which has 1440x900px on this device).

There has been some notes on the Libreboot web page but they did not work out for me until I figured out that there was a bug in the documentation. I sent a fix to the mailinglist which has already been applied, so if you look at the page now it already contains the corrected parameters.

I am also getting used to all the screws of the T400 which are definitely a lot. 😉

Besides that there have been some changes in the website hosting. https://freie.computer is now set up on a Raspi which is freely hosted on pcextreme.nl (thanks for the service). It might be a bit slow but it should work out to get in touch with us. And yes, you also might have noticed the s in the http string. It is now SSL enabled by default using StartSSL certificates. This might change when letsencrypt is ready for the public.

Today I tried to flash a Lenovo T400. It was already laying around here for a while, waiting to be flashed with Libreboot. The reason was because I was a bit scared of the disassembling of the device. And yes, I was right. T60 is not that easy to fully disassemble but this one tops it.

It took me about 40 minutes to remove all screws and to free the mainboard in order to access the flash chip. Sadly I made a mistake while attaching the clip to the chip and but power to it. This lead to the flasher to be destroyed. Hopefully the board is still working but I have not tested it yet. I have already ordered a new flasher and hope I can continue liberating that device. I will keep you updated.

In the meantime, here you can get a view of the disassembled T400.

The Local Group Zurich has started a new project called Freie Computer where we offer Laptops that run fully Libre. That does not only apply to the wireless chipset which often requires blobs to run, but also the BIOS itself. We have decided to stick with the Libreboot BIOS which does not come with any code that cannot be inspected, modified and shared.

The Laptops are refurbished and flashed by us. Some devices like the Lenovo X60 or the T60 can be flashed directly from the OS for first flash. Others like the Lenovo X200 require an external flasher and the right clips for the flash chip. We have spend some money to buy this equipment so we can now flash all supported variants.

As we do not need to earn money with this project, we can offer the Laptops for CHF 100 – CHF 300, depending on the model. We currently ship to Switzerland, Germany and Austria. For further information, please take a look at our homepage (German only). You can use the contact form to get in touch with us.