In early 2018, before I had children and with much, MUCH more free time, I bought a used X61, plus a used X60 1400x1050 LCD, a new backlight, new internal stereo speakers, a new mainboard with an Intel Core i7-5600U from 51NB, plus new SSD, 32 GB RAM, and the original IBM logo of a X60 which was replaced by a Lenovo logo on my chassis. It's the exact same setup as mentioned here [0], except that I built it myself from the individual parts for cost reasons.
The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.
This is really, really cool. I wonder, by extension, if it's feasible to reverse engineer all the various low-level firmware blobs too and have it hosted on LVFS so users can update it via fwupd (not sure if LVFS would be willing to host such firmware though).
But I would really like to see this trend take off, so we can take back control over smart devices and see more FOSS firmware pushed out to various devices (OpenWRT etc).
I have an x61 myself, bought it last year to add to my Thinkpad collection. I haven't done much besides put in some real to verify it actually works. And suggestions on an OS?
AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier this year.
Yeah, it's pretty cut and dry. Constitutionally, only the federal government is allowed to regulate intellectual property, so re-implementing anything that isn't protected by a trademark, copyright, or patent is fair game, and trademarks don't cover design, copyright only covers media, and patents expire in 20 tears.
Even the clean-room isolation that Phoenix went through isn't legally required, it just makes nuisance lawsuits more difficult. BSD prevailed over UNIX System Laboratories, in their reimplementation of Unix, despite having directly worked with the source code.
As with many things, this is a case of "it depends" - How you do it and for what reason, primarily. If you're reverse engineering code that's part of a DRM scheme for example, that's explicitly not allowed.
Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.
But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...
In early 2018, before I had children and with much, MUCH more free time, I bought a used X61, plus a used X60 1400x1050 LCD, a new backlight, new internal stereo speakers, a new mainboard with an Intel Core i7-5600U from 51NB, plus new SSD, 32 GB RAM, and the original IBM logo of a X60 which was replaced by a Lenovo logo on my chassis. It's the exact same setup as mentioned here [0], except that I built it myself from the individual parts for cost reasons.
The board arrived from Shenzhen after a month or so. I then had to manually fit (including drilling away some parts) the X60 LCD into the X61 chassis, which was extremely stressful. But in the end it all worked out perfectly. This X62 has been my private machine for 8 years now, and I always travel with it. The display still works perfectly, the 32 GB RAM are still more than enough, and it is still very easy to get X61 replacement batteries on Amazon. But the best thing is the form factor; this thing is just so neat and small and practical. Also the quality of the chassis is incredible. Apart from many, many scratches on the lid, it is still in flawless condition.
[0] https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/
This is really, really cool. I wonder, by extension, if it's feasible to reverse engineer all the various low-level firmware blobs too and have it hosted on LVFS so users can update it via fwupd (not sure if LVFS would be willing to host such firmware though).
But I would really like to see this trend take off, so we can take back control over smart devices and see more FOSS firmware pushed out to various devices (OpenWRT etc).
I have an x61 myself, bought it last year to add to my Thinkpad collection. I haven't done much besides put in some real to verify it actually works. And suggestions on an OS?
Windows 98SE.
Port any drivers you need with AI.
Only half-serious...
Sure, USA citizens are not allowed to reverse engineer
...yes we are? After all, that's how the whole IBM PC-compatible industry started.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Technologies#Cloning_t...
AFAIK the later Thinkpads including this one uses a Phoenix BIOS, so it's amusing to see the circularity of how things turned out; and continuing on that path, Phoenix sold its BIOS business to Lenovo a little earlier this year.
Yeah, it's pretty cut and dry. Constitutionally, only the federal government is allowed to regulate intellectual property, so re-implementing anything that isn't protected by a trademark, copyright, or patent is fair game, and trademarks don't cover design, copyright only covers media, and patents expire in 20 tears.
Even the clean-room isolation that Phoenix went through isn't legally required, it just makes nuisance lawsuits more difficult. BSD prevailed over UNIX System Laboratories, in their reimplementation of Unix, despite having directly worked with the source code.
As with many things, this is a case of "it depends" - How you do it and for what reason, primarily. If you're reverse engineering code that's part of a DRM scheme for example, that's explicitly not allowed.
Coreboot is debatable for this, it's fine in the sense that nobody is going to come after you for it, but legally you're not doing a clean room implementation, you're looking at the original and creating a new functional replacement, which is fundamentally different to the Phoenix BIOS clone, and not in a good way.
But as I said, nobody is going to come after you for it so...
Kudos for getting this done!
Sad that free BIOSes are so far behind modern hardware, but this is very necessary work.