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.
I upgraded the screen to the 1400x1050 with a new display panel from china, but I had to cut the front screen protector and remove the "oil". It seems a little bit darker without that liquid inside and dust particles entered in that space. I couldn't find any LCD upgrade for the CCFL lamp at that time and now I'm not sure it's worth the effort.
I'd love to see a working coreboot for X60/61 Tablets that can still boot DOS and WinXP.
I wish it could go up to 32GB though. And the i7 in there shows its age. But it's still usable with modern software!
Best of all he even published on Github the result so that, hopefully, others benefit from his effort without even having to do it again.
Quite a different message than yours.
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).
The more straight forward (and 64 bit) candidate would be Slackware 15.0 with a few of Alien Bob's slackbuilds.
But, of course, the retro computing approach mentioned by another poster would look really nice and be a conversation piece.
Port any drivers you need with AI.
Only half-serious...
Win2000 or WinXP would be a better choice due to numerous reasons though. Win2K with an SSD is absolutely going to fly on that thing.
these machines are amazing, but sadly they're showing signs of age these days. mine's already kinda unusable due to dim CCFL backlight and fan grinding noise.
Sad that free BIOSes are so far behind modern hardware, but this is very necessary work.
[The following question is only valid if you meant "free" as in "GPL/BSD"]
Is it completely clear that LLM code is considered "clean room" and won't leak copyrighted code?
afaik all modern x86 chromebooks ship with coreboot based firmware
...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.
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.
It turns out that's not exactly the case! See, e.g., Goldstein v. California, 412 U.S. 546 (1973). Before 1978, state (often common law) copyright used to cover a lot of pre-publication works, and until 2018 (when the federal law was amended) state copyright law covered pre-1972 sound recordings, and state copyright still covers obscure things like post-mortem moral rights in visual art or rights to "unfixed" works. See 1 Nimmer on Copyright §§ A.02 & 2.02. Other forms of intellectual property (trade secrets, rights of publicity) remain mostly creatures of state law, and some states also have trademark systems.
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...