After many days of failed attempts, yesterday @Diego Roversi finally managed to setup SPI on the BeagleBone White¹, and that means that today at our home it was Laptop Liberation Day!

We took the spare X200, opened it, found the point we were on in the tutorial installing libreboot on x200, connected all of the proper cables on the clip³ and did some reading tests of the original bios.



While the tutorial mentioned a very conservative setting (512kHz), just for fun we tried to read it at different speed and all results up to 16384 kHz were equal, with the first failure at 32784 kHz, so we settled on using 8192 kHz.

Then it was time to customize our libreboot image with the right MAC address, and that's when we realized that the sheet of paper where we had written it down the last time had been put in a safe place… somewhere…

Luckily we also had taken a picture, and that was easier to find, so we checked the keyboard map², followed the instructions to customize the image, flashed the chip, partially reassembled the laptop, started it up and… a black screen, some fan noise and nothing else.

We tried to reflash the chip (nothing was changed), tried the us keyboard image, in case it was the better tested one (same results) and reflashed the original bios, just to check that the laptop was still working (it was).

It was lunchtime, so we stopped our attempts. As soon as we started eating, however, we realized that this laptop came with 3GB of RAM, and that surely meant "no matching pairs of RAM", so just after lunch we reflashed the first image, removed one dimm, rebooted and finally saw a gnu-hugging penguin!

We then tried booting some random live usb key we had around (failed the first time, worked the second and further one with no changes), and then proceeded to install Debian.

Running the installer required some attempts and a bit of duckduckgoing: parsing the isolinux / grub configurations from the libreboot menu didn't work, but in the end it was as easy as going to the command line and running:


linux (usb0)/install.amd/vmlinuz
initrd (usb0)/install.amd/initrd.gz
boot


From there on, it was the usual debian installation and a well know environment, and there were no surprises. I've noticed that grub-coreboot is not installed (grub-pc is) and I want to investigate a bit, but rebooting worked out of the box with no issue.

Next step will be liberating my own X200 laptop, and then if you are around the @Gruppo Linux Como area and need a 16 pin clip let us know and we may bring everything to one of the LUG meetings⁴

¹ yes, white, and most of the instructions on the interwebz talk about the black, which is extremely similar to the white… except where it isn't

² wait? there are keyboard maps? doesn't everybody just use the us one regardless of what is printed on the keys? Do I *live* with somebody who doesn't? :D

³ the breadboard in the picture is only there for the power supply, the chip on it is a cheap SPI flash used to test SPI on the bone without risking the laptop :)

⁴ disclaimer: it worked for us. it may not work on *your* laptop. it may brick it. it may invoke a tentacled monster, it may bind your firstborn son to a life of servitude to some supernatural being. Whatever happens, it's not our fault.