SIDEBAR
»
S
I
D
E
B
A
R
«
Ubuntu 18.04 Tweaks for a 16.04 User
Jun 24th, 2019 by miki

This post will detail some stuff I’ve done to a plain Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop (bionic) to make me feel a little more at home in the transition from my daily driver for years the 16.04 release using Canoncial’s Unity as the primary desktop interface to the GNOME Shell of 18.04. Canonical abandoned the former after shifting focus from the convergence and personal device market to cloud and IoT in 2017 leaving development of its mobile OS, Ubuntu Touch which Unity is a part of, to the community formed UBports project (Unity8 is now known as Lomiri). I’ve been putting off this transition exactly because I knew it would require me to make some tweaks to my daily routines, but this system is not one I use on a daily basis so it will make the transition a gentle ride.

The intention is to update this as the experience progresses.

EDIT 2021-08-25: clean up and publish dormant draft post

Browsing GNOME Extensions

To be able to install GNOME Extensions directly from a browser while perusing the directory at extensions.gnome.org, add the GNOME Shell Integration extension/add-on to your browser (Firefox add-on, Chrome Web Store), then install the Integration extension in GNOME to communicate with the browser extension:

sudo apt install chrome-gnome-shell

After this you can go to extensions.gnome.org/local/ to see, configure and update installed extensions.

Useful GNOME Extensions

Time Keeping

World/Alarm/Stopwatch/Timer application

GNOME includes a nice Clock application which is available in the package repository but not installed by default;

sudo apt install gnome-clocks

Installing the Alarm Clock extension described above, will also show the application’s alarms in the notification area.

Notification bar

I like both the date and seconds to be displayed in the head of the desktop, so to format the text a couple of extensions are available;

Comments Off on Ubuntu 18.04 Tweaks for a 16.04 User
Itch: eog core dump on Galaxy 7 panorama image
Jun 10th, 2019 by miki

  • Took some photos with my Galaxy 7. Some were panoramas.
  • EOG crashed while loading them.
  • Memory was low.
  • Maybe related to previously experienced missing EOI marker issue with Samsung camera application.

Will investigate later and amend the post (promise!).

Commandline Dump

$ free; find . -size +25M -exec bash -c 'ls -l {}; eog {}; echo' \;; free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        7746692     5767656      843228      317764     1135808     1271048
Swap:       7950332     5113012     2837320
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 39926496 Jun 10 19:25 ./20190609_184124.jpg

** (eog:23320): CRITICAL **: eog_reload_plugin_activate: assertion 'G_IS_MENU (model)' failed
eog: ../../../../src/cairo-xlib-surface-shm.c:619: _cairo_xlib_shm_pool_create: Assertion `*ptr != ((void *)0)' failed.
bash: line 1: 23320 Aborted                 (core dumped) eog ./20190609_184124.jpg

-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 38286099 Jun 10 19:26 ./20190609_183714.jpg

** (eog:23332): CRITICAL **: eog_reload_plugin_activate: assertion 'G_IS_MENU (model)' failed
eog: ../../../../src/cairo-xlib-surface-shm.c:619: _cairo_xlib_shm_pool_create: Assertion `*ptr != ((void *)0)' failed.
bash: line 1: 23332 Aborted                 (core dumped) eog ./20190609_183714.jpg

-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 36181801 Jun  9 17:13 ./20190609_160437.jpg

** (eog:23343): CRITICAL **: eog_reload_plugin_activate: assertion 'G_IS_MENU (model)' failed

** (eog:23343): CRITICAL **: eog_reload_plugin_deactivate: assertion 'G_IS_MENU (menu)' failed

-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 39059177 Jun 10 19:25 ./20190609_184146.jpg

** (eog:23354): CRITICAL **: eog_reload_plugin_activate: assertion 'G_IS_MENU (model)' failed
eog: ../../../../src/cairo-xlib-surface-shm.c:619: _cairo_xlib_shm_pool_create: Assertion `*ptr != ((void *)0)' failed.
bash: line 1: 23354 Aborted                 (core dumped) eog ./20190609_184146.jpg

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        7746692     5773448      495604      659944     1477640      922956
Swap:       7950332     5112700     2837632
$

 

Comments Off on Itch: eog core dump on Galaxy 7 panorama image
[Danish] S&S: Android-x86 og Chromebook
Jun 8th, 2019 by miki

Lidt flere dråber i Spørgsmål&Svar-kategorien fra Facebook.

Når jeg endelig forvilder mig derind, og går på opdagelse i de tekniske grupper, ender det ofte med at får jeg skrevet en fristil i forsøget på at hjælpe.

Denne gang en snak om Android på “PC”, og basale digitale processeringsbehov for den almindelige dansker.

Spørgsmål

Stillet i gruppen “Danske Android Brugere “:

Er der nogen som ved, om man kan få en pc med Android system?

Svar

Mit svar:

Som andre omtaler, kan der fås en uofficiel variant af det frie styresystem Android til x86-arkitekturen (den gængse Intel/AMD-baserede computer kendt som “personlig computer”).

Det projekt lever på https://www.android-x86.org/. Installationsvejledning på engelsk er på https://www.android-x86.org/installhowto.html. Man kan både installere som multiboot på samme disk som et eksisterende operativsystem, starte fra en ekstern disk (USB-medie, cd/dvdrom e.l.) eller evt. køre i en virtuel maskine på et eksisterende operativsystem (VirtualBox,QEMU/KVM, VMware Player/Workstation).

Jeg har kun erfaring med livedisk boot fra USB og VM, og der synes jeg ikke altid tingene spiller perfekt, så forvent ikke en helt problemfri oplevelse.

“Android på PC” er på kanten af noget understøttet, hvor man ofte er på egen hånd. Nogle af folkene bag Andoid-x86 forsøgte at lave en kommerciel forretning på det, hvor det var tanken at sælge det som færdige hardwareenheder, RemixOS – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remix_OS, men det gik ikke så godt og er lukket ned igen.

Hvis behovet bare er “en bærbar computer uden for meget vrøvl”, så er en færdig Chromebook med Chrome OS (der ligesom Android også er bygget på GNU/Linux) eller noget af det der dyre Frugt-udstyr nok det mest tilgængelige (men jeg fornemmer at pris også kunne være en faktor?). Til forskel fra traditionelle operativsystemer til computere, er Chrome OS dog møntet specifikt på at få dig til at bruge Googles webbaserede tjenester (mere om softwaren bag på https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os), så hverken software eller hardware er beregnet til at lagre data på selve enheden, og der er sjældent meget diskplads tilgængelig til f.eks. billeder.

Et hurtigt kig på markedet identificerer Acer Chromebook 15 (https://www.edbpriser.dk/produkt/acer-chromebook-15-cb515-1h-c7kg/) og Lenovo S330 (https://www.edbpriser.dk/produkt/lenovo-chromebook-s330-81jw-3292492/) som populære Chromebook i 2k kr.-klassen, men kender ikke maskinerne specifikt.

God jagt :).

Comments Off on [Danish] S&S: Android-x86 og Chromebook
Automating wav to ogg conversion
Jun 6th, 2019 by miki

EDIT 2021-07-11: the script described below has been added to the author’s hometools repository on sourcehut.org

Needed some space on the disk.

Had some music, some of it were wav files.

Threw together this script to transmogify it into ogg using ffmpeg.

Statistics say that 24 wav files occupying 1,7 GiB was made into 24 ogg files occupying 105 MiB, a reduction to ~6% (du -h calculates 2^10 numbers but uses SI 10^3 prefixes..).

miki@filly:~/Music$ find . -iname "*.wav" -print0 | sed s/.wav/.ogg/g |du --files0-from=- -h -c|tail -1
105M	total
miki@filly:~/Music$ find . -iname "*.wav" -print0 | sed s/.wav/.wav/g |du --files0-from=- -h -c|tail -1
1,7G total
miki@filly:~/Music$ find . -iname "*.wav" -print0 | sed s/.wav/.ogg/g |du --files0-from=- -h |wc -l
24
miki@filly:~/Music$

Script

Install prerequisite ffmpeg and ffprobe utilities on apt distributions by doing “apt install ffmpeg”.

BEWARE: script deletes any wav files in current directory and below without warning if conversion to ogg is fine according to ffmpeg return code and stdout/err.

Manual confirmation of all deletions can be enabled by uncommenting line 8 (CONFIRM=..).

It could (very) easily be amended for conversion between any container or compression format supported by ffmpeg by replacing “wav” and “ogg” in glob pattern and OGG variable definition (for completeness also in echo output…).

miki@filly:~/wavtest$ cat ~/hometools/wav2ogg.sh
#! /bin/bash
#
# Make .ogg out of all .wav in cwd and below, remove .wav!
#
# When converting remove only if conversion is ok.
# ffprobe any present .ogg and check if playtime is same as wav, remove only if all is good.

#CONFIRM=-i # confirm deletion?

REQS="ffmpeg ffprobe"
which $REQS  >/dev/null
if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then
    echo We need $REQS to do stuff!
    exit 1
fi

shopt -s globstar nullglob nocaseglob # enable 2-star magic
for f in **/*.wav; do
    OGG=$(dirname "$f")/$(basename "$f" wav)ogg
    echo -n "$f: "
    if [ ! -f "$OGG" ]; then
        echo -en "\e[33mno ogg\e[0m"
        CONVERT=1
    else
        echo -en "\e[32malready there\e[0m"
        if [ ! "$(ffprobe "$f" 2>&1|grep Duration|cut -d, -f1)" = "$(ffprobe "$OGG" 2>&1|grep Duration|cut -d, -f1)" ]; then
            echo -en " - \e[31mogg corrupt\e[0m"
            CONVERT=1
            rm $CONFIRM "$OGG"
        else
            OGGOK=1
        fi
    fi
    if [ $CONVERT ]; then
        echo -en " - \e[33mconverting\e[0m"
        OUT=$(ffmpeg -loglevel error -i "$f" "$OGG" 2>&1)
        if [ ! $? -eq 0 ]; then
            echo -e " \e[31mfatal error!\e[0m\nffmpeg output was:\n\n$OUT\n"
            rm $CONFIRM "$OGG"
        elif [ ! -z "$OUT" ]; then
            echo -e " \e[31mnon-fatal error!\e[0m\nffmpeg output was:\n\n$OUT\n"
        else
            OGGOK=1
        fi
    fi
    if [ $OGGOK ]; then
        echo -e " - all good removing wav"
        rm $CONFIRM "$f"
    fi
done
miki@filly:~/wavtest$

Usage and Output

Before

miki@filly:~/wavtest$ ls -lR
.:
total 59964
drwxrwxr-x 3 miki miki     4096 Jun  6 22:33 one
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 61390864 Jun  6 22:32 Sordid Affair (Man Without Country Version).wav

./one:
total 30720
drwxrwxr-x 3 miki miki     4096 Jun  6 22:34 two
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 31451304 Jun  6 22:30 Vision Man MASTER.wav

./one/two:
total 55352
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 56675660 Jun  6 22:34 Bye Barat - Going For Broke (UNKWON´s Autumn Remix) LIM_02.wav
drwxrwxr-x 2 miki miki     4096 Jun  6 22:34 three

./one/two/three:
total 375112
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 384108056 Jun  6 22:30 Rigoremix - Pornographe - Final2.wav
miki@filly:~/wavtest$ du -hs .
509M	.
miki@filly:~/wavtest$

During

In real life, also in technicolor!

miki@filly:~/wavtest$ ~/hometools/wav2ogg.sh 
one/two/Bye Barat - Going For Broke (UNKWON´s Autumn Remix) LIM_02.wav: no ogg - converting - all good removing wav
one/two/three/Rigoremix - Pornographe - Final2.wav: no ogg - converting - all good removing wav
one/Vision Man MASTER.wav: no ogg - converting - all good removing wav
Sordid Affair (Man Without Country Version).wav: no ogg - converting - all good removing wav
miki@filly:~/wavtest$

After

miki@filly:~/wavtest$ ls -lR
.:
total 4952
drwxrwxr-x 3 miki miki    4096 Jun  6 22:35 one
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 5066460 Jun  6 22:35 Sordid Affair (Man Without Country Version).ogg

./one:
total 2528
drwxrwxr-x 3 miki miki    4096 Jun  6 22:34 two
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 2580752 Jun  6 22:35 Vision Man MASTER.ogg

./one/two:
total 4680
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 4785594 Jun  6 22:34 Bye Barat - Going For Broke (UNKWON´s Autumn Remix) LIM_02.ogg
drwxrwxr-x 2 miki miki    4096 Jun  6 22:35 three

./one/two/three:
total 19456
-rw-rw-r-- 1 miki miki 19922936 Jun  6 22:35 Rigoremix - Pornographe - Final2.ogg
miki@filly:~/wavtest$ du -hs .
31M .
miki@filly:~/wavtest$

Metadata

ffmpeg does some nice metadata conversions out of the box;

miki@filly:~/Music$ ffprobe ~/"wavbak/Delayscape  A Short While Rigolin Edit Audaccity.wav" 2>&1| grep Input -A 1000
Input #0, wav, from '/home/miki/wavbak/Delayscape  A Short While Rigolin Edit Audaccity.wav':
  Metadata:
    title           : Delayscape - A Short While (Rigolin Edit)
    artist          : rigolin
    comment         : Love Melody
    date            : 2018
  Duration: 00:06:33.97, bitrate: 3072 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Audio: pcm_f32le ([3][0][0][0] / 0x0003), 48000 Hz, 2 channels, flt, 3072 kb/s
miki@filly:~/Music$ ffprobe "./Delayscape - Heinz Beauvaix/Soundcloud/Delayscape  A Short While Rigolin Edit Audaccity.ogg" 2>&1| grep Input -A 1000
Input #0, ogg, from './Delayscape - Heinz Beauvaix/Soundcloud/Delayscape  A Short While Rigolin Edit Audaccity.ogg':
  Duration: 00:06:33.97, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 99 kb/s
    Stream #0:0: Audio: vorbis, 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 112 kb/s
    Metadata:
      ENCODER         : Lavc56.60.100 libvorbis
      TITLE           : Delayscape - A Short While (Rigolin Edit)
      ARTIST          : rigolin
      comment         : Love Melody
      DATE            : 2018
miki@filly:~/Music$

Source Material

Comments Off on Automating wav to ogg conversion
Libreboot’ing an X200 using a CH341a based programmer
Jun 4th, 2019 by miki

EDIT: further images from this process were lost in a phone smash incident, sorry

Here’s a preliminary HOWTO from my recent external flashing of the BIOS ROM on a Lenovo X200 thinkpad (Wikipedia). The particular firmware flashed was a Libreboot build for this machine (instructions for X200 and details of the external flashing procedure) but anything goes (but anything may not be useful, though).

I’ll amend this HOWTO with more detailed instructions and pictures in the following days (warning: a prediction) to hopefully make it more complete and useful for the vary inhabitants of LibreBootLand.

Some parts

A programmer kit was bought on AliExpress for $4.20 containing a USB programmer board and an SOIC-8 clip which ended up not being used as the particular X200 had a SOIC-16 chip so a separately ordered SOIC-16 chip ($3.11)  was used.

“MinProgramment” aka. CH341a Programmer

Buy: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32898599200.html @ $4.20

The programmer is based on the WCH CH341a chip which is an USB <-> seriel/parallel/uart interface. The manufacturer WCH being  WinChipHead aka. WCH (Nanjing QinHeng Electronics Co.,Ltd) (maybe also aka. WCH-IC (Jiangsu Qinheng Co., Ltd)). There are lots of options for buying board varieties based on the CH341a chip, to get you started here is a BangGood search and an AliExpress search.

Boards like this has also been described by others including a deduced schematic, EEVblog critique of the I/O pin power on similar boards (not yet confirmed whether that is true for this programmer too, I guess so, but at least one flashing done without damage) and a mention on hackaday of other board types.

There are a bunch of downloads from the WCH site regarding the chip including  a Chinese datasheet, no English language documentation seems to be available from the manufacturer however. There are some English editions of the datasheet to be found, of unknown origin. They seem plausible enough to use, though. Somebody has attempted to collect documentation about the chip in a Git repository.

The SOIC-16 Clip (aka. Pomona 5252)

Buy: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32869145935.html @ $3.11

To attach physically to the Macronix MX25L6405D flash memory chip in a SOIC-16 package present on the X200 in question (words are that this is the norm although the board can be populated with a SOIC-8 too) a clip that matches the pins of the SOIC-16 package is needed. I bought the one mentioned above for $3.11 at random from AliExpress and this worked fine. In the pictures the wiring is hooked up correctly to the programmer to allow for flashing as described below.

WARNING: Below is still a draft made from mental notes! Ask me if you need more information or check back soon (I promise).

Connections

6405 <-> CH341a

MISO<->MIOS (label error, should be MISO)

MOSI<->MOSI

CLK <-> CLK

CS <-> SS

GND <-> GND

First tried driving the the flash chip from VDD on ch341a but this was unsuccessful, no chip could be found, so the 6405 was hooked up to external 3.3v power supply with supply GND connected to GND on CH341a to align the ground potential between ch341a I/O supply and 6405 supply (important!).

Preparations

Machine being flashed

Update Embedded Controller

To get the latest ECP (Embedded Controller Program) from Lenovo (no free alternative exists) containing software for the MCU controlling low level hardware like battery charging/keyboard/backlight stuff you need to update the BIOS which also updates the ECP. Most recent version for X200 is “BIOS: 3.22 / ECP: 1.07“. This is not needed if you already have these versions on the machine, check current versions by pressing ThinkVantage during boot and choosing “Enter Setup”.

If your system has a Windows installation download and run the “BIOS Update Utility“executeable. Else you’ll need to get the “BIOS Update Bootable CD” and somehow get it on a CD and find a CD-ROM drive. Alternatively on a Linux system the CD file system can be extracted and added to Grub to be directly bootable. Below was done on an Ubuntu 16.04 system:

$ sudo apt install genisoimage syslinux
$ wget -q https://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/6duj48us.iso
$ geteltorito 6duj48us.iso > 6duj48us.img
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 75776 sector(s) of 512 Bytes
Image has been written to stdout ….
$ sudo cp 6duj48us.im /boot
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot
$ sudo nano /etc/grub.d/40_custom
<add lines below to the end of file, preserve the “exec tail…” line>
menuentry “BIOS Update” {
linux16 /memdisk
initrd16 /6duj48us.im
}
$ sudo update-grub

Reboot, press <left shift> key while booting to access Grub, choose BIOS Update menu entry and follow the Lenovo update procedure. To start flashing it requires both a connected power supply and also a working, non-exhausted battery (!) mounted in the machine. This is tiresome for owners of worn out batteries…

Some notes about the flashing process can be found in the documentation of a patch set for the Lenovo BIOS.

Machine doing the programming

Install Flashrom

sudo apt install flashrom

ch341a support in flashrom

LibreBoot

Retrieve

Download the stable LibreBoot firmware: https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/libreboot.org/release/stable/20160907/rom/grub/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz

The brave will of course want to compile it themselves.

$ cd
$ wget https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/libreboot.org/release/stable/20160907/rom/grub/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz
--2019-06-07 07:35:21--  https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/libreboot.org/release/stable/20160907/rom/grub/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz
Resolving www.mirrorservice.org (www.mirrorservice.org)... 212.219.56.184, 2001:630:341:12::184
Connecting to www.mirrorservice.org (www.mirrorservice.org)|212.219.56.184|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1632800 (1,6M) [application/x-xz]
Saving to: ‘libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz’

libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz 100%[================================================================================>]   1,56M  --.-KB/s    in 0,1s    

2019-06-07 07:35:21 (13,9 MB/s) - ‘libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz’ saved [1632800/1632800]
$ tar tf libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb.tar.xz 
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_deqwertz_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_esqwerty_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_frazerty_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_frdvbepo_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_itqwerty_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_svenska_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_ukdvorak_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_ukqwerty_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usdvorak_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usqwerty_txtmode.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_deqwertz_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_esqwerty_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_frazerty_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_frdvbepo_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_itqwerty_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_svenska_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_ukdvorak_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_ukqwerty_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usdvorak_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb.rom
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/ChangeLog
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/NEWS
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/version
libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/versiondate
$

Customise MAC address

As the MAC address of the ethnernet PHY is stored in the flash, yo have your X200 ethernet MAC address correspond to the sticker on the back of the machine, and also avoid a potential but improbable DHCP/ARP conflict, the MAC address from the label/ifconfig from the existing system must be embedded into the flash file that we are going to program into the flash chip.

For this a tool called ich9gen is needed, this is a part of the libreboot repository and we need to build it ourselves.

Build ich9gen

$ git clone https://notabug.org/libreboot/libreboot
Cloning into 'libreboot'...
remote: Counting objects: 29080, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (9855/9855), done.
remote: Total 29080 (delta 18748), reused 27899 (delta 18057)
Receiving objects: 100% (29080/29080), 63.90 MiB | 11.13 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (18748/18748), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
$ cd libreboot/projects/ich9gen/sources
$ make
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/ich9deblob.c -o obj/ich9deblob.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/common/descriptor_gbe.c -o obj/common/descriptor_gbe.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/descriptor/descriptor.c -o obj/descriptor/descriptor.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/gbe/gbe.c -o obj/gbe/gbe.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/common/x86compatibility.c -o obj/common/x86compatibility.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 obj/ich9deblob.o obj/common/descriptor_gbe.o \
	obj/common/x86compatibility.o obj/descriptor/descriptor.o obj/gbe/gbe.o \
	 -o ich9deblob
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/ich9gen.c -o obj/ich9gen.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/ich9gen/mkdescriptor.c -o obj/ich9gen/mkdescriptor.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/ich9gen/mkgbe.c -o obj/ich9gen/mkgbe.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 obj/ich9gen.o obj/ich9gen/mkdescriptor.o obj/ich9gen/mkgbe.o \
 obj/common/descriptor_gbe.o \
	obj/common/x86compatibility.o obj/descriptor/descriptor.o obj/gbe/gbe.o \
	 -o ich9gen
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 -c src/demefactory.c -o obj/demefactory.o
gcc -I. -Wall -Wextra -g -std=c99 obj/demefactory.o obj/common/descriptor_gbe.o \
	obj/common/x86compatibility.o obj/descriptor/descriptor.o obj/gbe/gbe.o \
	 -o demefactory
$

Run ich9gen

Running ich9gen itself generates the flash descriptor (fd) header including possible configuration section where the MAC address is stored for the gigabit ethernet (gbe) PHY onboard the ICH9 chipset. When run six 12 KiB files for respectively 4, 8 and 16 MiB binary images and chipsets including (gbe) and excluding (nogbe) gigabit ethernet PHY are generated.

“aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff” in the commandline should be replaced with the actual 12 hex digits from the label on the machine or by running ifconfig on the machine using the existing Lenovo BIOS.

$ cd ~/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/
$ ~/libreboot/projects/ich9gen/sources/ich9gen --macaddress aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff
You selected to change the MAC address in the Gbe section. This has been done.

The modified gbe region has also been dumped as src files: mkgbe.c, mkgbe.h
To use these in ich9gen, place them in src/ich9gen/ and re-build ich9gen.

descriptor and gbe successfully written to the file: ich9fdgbe_4m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdgbe_4m.bin of=libreboot.rom bs=1 count=12k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor+gbe to your ROM image)

descriptor and gbe successfully written to the file: ich9fdgbe_8m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdgbe_8m.bin of=libreboot.rom bs=1 count=12k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor+gbe to your ROM image)

descriptor and gbe successfully written to the file: ich9fdgbe_16m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdgbe_16m.bin of=libreboot.rom bs=1 count=12k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor+gbe to your ROM image)

descriptor successfully written to the file: ich9fdnogbe_4m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdnogbe_4m.bin of=yourrom.rom bs=1 count=4k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor to your ROM image)

descriptor successfully written to the file: ich9fdnogbe_8m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdnogbe_8m.bin of=yourrom.rom bs=1 count=4k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor to your ROM image)

descriptor successfully written to the file: ich9fdnogbe_16m.bin
Now do: dd if=ich9fdnogbe_16m.bin of=yourrom.rom bs=1 count=4k conv=notrunc
(in other words, add the modified descriptor to your ROM image)

Apply Flash Descriptor to Binary

$ cd ~/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/
$ cp -v x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb{,_customised}.rom
'x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb.rom' -> 'x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb_customised.rom'
$ dd if=ich9fdgbe_8m.bin of=x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb_customised.rom bs=1 count=12k conv=notrunc
12288+0 records in
12288+0 records out
12288 bytes (12 kB, 12 KiB) copied, 0,0299453 s, 410 kB/s
$

Procedure

Programmer Setup Validation / Lenovo BIOS backup

flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -r rom1.bin

flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -r rom2.bin

flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -r rom3.bin

flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -r rom4.bin

flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -r rom5.bin

cmp rom{1,2}.bin

cmp rom{1,3}.bin

cmp rom{1,4}.bin

cmp rom{1,5}.bin

Flashing

$ sudo flashrom -p ch341a_spi -c MX25L6405D -w ~/libreboot_r20160907_grub_x200_8mb/x200_8mb_usqwerty_vesafb_customised.rom
$

Accounts of LibreBoot Flashing

Embedded Controller (EC) information

Comments Off on Libreboot’ing an X200 using a CH341a based programmer
»  Substance:WordPress   »  Style:Ahren Ahimsa
© 2023 Mikkel Kirkgaard Nielsen, contents CC BY-SA 4.0