Goal:
Give an old Lenovo Thinkpad W500 a second life featuring Coreboot and Ubuntu
My partner replaced his laptop already two years and half ago, buying a beautiful brand-new Lenovo Thinkpad T480s. The old machine, a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 - heavier and bulkier and a lot less pretty - wasn’t getting any further updates for Windows 7 and it was painfully slow, rarely being used. Furthermore, the machine was overheating and the battery was almost dead.
The EHCI Debug Port is an optional capability of EHCI controllers which can be used for early debugging for hardware which does not have a serial port. All USB2 host controllers are EHCI controllers.
Since I installed Coreboot on my Librem, I experienced some issues. In order to investigate - and since the Librem has no serial port - I aimed to do some Coreboot and kernel debugging with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
DISCLAIMER: try anything described here at your own risk! These are just my notes. That it did work for me then does not mean this would work for you now.
After successfully installing coreboot on my librem 13 v1, I noticed that unfortunately the wifi wasn’t working anymore. Since the coreboot version I flashed previously wasn’t quite new, I decided to build a new rom image myself using the newest coreboot source code.
DISCLAIMER: try this at your own risk! The information below it’s just a summary of my notes and experiences during the installation of coreboot on my notebook.
I am the proud owner of a Librem 13 v1 (bought in September 2016). Currently all librem laptops are shipped with coreboot installed on them, but mine was still shipped with propietary firmware on it. Fortunately coreboot is supported anyway - it was possible for me to install coreboot myself.
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