In this thread[1] someone suggested Middleton's BIOS, which appears to be a modified version of the Lenovo BIOS for the X61 that removes the hardware whitelist. It doesn't seem to be free, but neither is the BIOS it replaces, and if it makes it possible to install a freedom-respecting WiFi card then I consider it better freedom-wise than keeping the factory BIOS.
The problem is that the necessary files are distributed as a rar
archive, and I'm not sure how to extract it using free software.
I installed unrar-free,
$ sudo apt install unrar-free
downloaded the archive,
and attempted to extract it.
$ unrar x
Dual-IDA_SATA-II_Whitelist_SLIC21_ThinkPad_X61_X61s_BIOS_(2.22-1.03).rar
Some of the files did extract correctly, but most of them said FAILED. I
then tried unar,
$ unar
Dual-IDA_SATA-II_Whitelist_SLIC21_ThinkPad_X61_X61s_BIOS_\(2.22-1.03\).rar
and it seemed that not as many failed, and I got a more descriptive
error message for the ones that did fail.
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/$01B2000.FL1 (2316822 B)... Failed!
(Attempted to read more data than was available)
BIOS update/32-bit/$01B2000.FL1 (2316822 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read
more data than was available)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/$01B2000.FL2 (2103350 B)... Failed!
(Attempted to read more data than was available)
BIOS update/32-bit/$01B2000.FL2 (2103350 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read
more data than was available)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f1.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06f1.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f4.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06f4.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f5.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06f5.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f9.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06f9.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fa.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06fa.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fb.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06fb.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fd.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/06fd.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10661.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/10661.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10671.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/10671.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10674.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/10674.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10676.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong
checksum)
BIOS update/32-bit/10676.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum)
BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/#1.iso (6387712 B)... Segmentation fault
Searching for these two errors ("Attempted to read more data than was
available" and "Wrong checksum") and "unar" I was able to find a few bug
reports, but none with solutions.
Until now I have been fortunate enough to never have had to deal with a
rar file, but from what I can gather it is not a free format, and free
tools for extracting them like unrar-free and unar can only open some
rar files. Does this look like a file that can't be extracted freely, or
is there another issue here? Is it worth trying a newer version of unar?
Trisquel 8 has 1.9 and it looks like 1.10 is available in Debian
testing.
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