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27.09.2019 - Corebooting a Lenovo Thinkpad x230 - The easy way
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Some time ago I stumbled about this project called Skulls(1). They
advertaise an easy Coreboot instalation with precompiled roms and 
scripts which should make the instalation a one liner. I saved this 
to the rubric "yeah pretty nice and maybe someday usefull" and for-
got about it (:
Then one night clicking through some CCC videos I found a talk at 
FOSDEM 2019 (3) promoting and showing the ease of instalation of
Skulls on a X230. The Person said something like "With SkullsProject
you dont have any excuses anymore not to have coreboot on your 
computer."
With an x230 + Skulls you end up having Coreboot + Seabios as pay-
load installed You can choose from properiatary VGA bios or open-
source Seabios VGA. The opensource cant display the grub loader in 
full resolution but this is the only "quirk".
The Intel Managment Engine will still be on your computer but as
they say "neutred". This means it so so far stripped down that it 
SHOULD not work anymore.

The parts I bought:

x230 form a linuxcomputer reseller            190.-
250gb Samsung SSD                             ~50.-
Pamona Soic Clip 8 Pin 5250                    20.-
USB Programmer CH341A                         ~10.-
DC-DC converter 5V -> 3.3V                      2.-

I ordered the parts which they mention on their Githubpage.
Before I could start flashing the Skulls rom I had to update the 
EC-Chip because this cant be done with Coreboot on. But before I 
could update the EC-Chip the original Bios had to be updated because
it was a pretty old one from back in the days.
Lenovo roms are meant to be updated from Windows or written to a CD
which I lack both. I followed this link (2) and got finaly my Bios
updated to a semi actual one to flash the newest EC firmware.
Then I could run the x230_skulls.sh which returned that everything
was ok now and is ready to be flashed with Skulls.
From now on the whole process took aproxemately 10 - 20 minutes.
I cloned their Githubrepo to another computer and disassembled the 
x230. Connecting the wires to the programmer and the flashclip was
straight forward because of their good documentation.
First I updated the lower chip with: 
sudo ./external_install_bottom.sh -m -k <backup-file-to-create> .
Then I updated the upper chip with:
sudo ./external_install_top.sh -k <backup-file-to-create> .
I just had to choose which kind of programmer I am using Rpi/CH341A
and which videobios I want to have IntelVgaBios/SeabioVGA.
I was pretty nervous to brick my just new device but everything went
just flawlessly first try. Bravo!
Now the x230 boots very quickly through Seabios.
Although the whole process looks pretty hacky in their documentation
you dont have to knwo much about the process because of the good
manual they provide you can follow step by step.
I think even computer novices can do this.
In comparison to my x200 the speedupgrade is very noticeable.
On x200 I have to use Mpv + ytdl to stay at 20% Cpu load playing 
youtubevideos. The x230 does the same task with the same load play-
ing the video in firefox. Although I still use a minimal tiling wm
its nice to have this extra power.

(1) https://github.com/merge/skulls/blob/master/x230/README.md
(2) https://github.com/eigenmatt/mec-tools
(3) https://gra.mirror.cyberbits.eu/fosdem/2019/H.2215/
    skulls_coreboot.webm
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