Thinkpad x200T

Throughout high school, I used a desktop for all things technology related. Senior year, however, I began to realize I was going to need a laptop in college. As with any tech-related product, I spent months searching for the perfect laptop that would last me the next 4 years. Around this time, my passion for Linux was just beginning and it wasn't until the final months of high school that I realized the perfect laptop for me was not the newest Macbook or lightest laptop with a full GPU. I realized the perfect laptop for me was the librebootabled 2008 Thinkpad x200T.

Libre what?

Libre (Spanish for free) is a tech term popularized by Richard Stallman to describe software that is freely accessible for anyone to use, view, and modify (free as in free speech, not free beer). Libreboot is a completely "free" version of the mostly open source Coreboot. Coreboot is an open source project aimed at replacing the firmware on motherboards. Nearly all new motherboards have a management engine (such as the Intel ME or AMD PSP) and proprietary firmware embedded in them that could allow the manufacturers or government to spy on the user. Libreboot only really works on older laptops but it replaces all the proprietary firmware so there is no way anybody could be secretly spying.

Physical Modifications

After buying an x200T on eBay, I had to take the entire thing apart to access the back of the motherboard. To replace the bios on a Thinkpad x200, you must overwrite the current bios by attaching wires to the bios chip. On the x200T, this chip is extremely small and it's recommended you de-solder the chip. I didn't have the equipment for this, so instead, I used a clamp to hold stripped wires in place and used a Raspberry Pi to overwrite the chip.

This process took my me and friend an entire night but by the end, we had a laptop with absolutely no proprietary firmware. Next, I purchased and installed a new battery, new ram, an SSD, a new CPU heat sink, a new open source WiFi card, and a USB C charging port!

Software

With all the hardware setup, the next step was to ensure all the software I installed is free and open source to ensure that is zero possibility of spying. Thankfully, Libreboot also comes with the GRUB payload which means I could encrypt my entire SSD in plain mode and use the bios to decrypt it. After setting up LVM2, I decided to install Gentoo with only packages found in the 'FSF-APPROVED' license group. Gentoo is unique to most Linux distros in that instead of just installing programming, the package manager installs the source code and compiles it locally to eliminate any chance of unknown code sneaking its way in (it also helps programs run faster as they can be compiled with flags unique to my system). With Gentoo installed, I decided to use the suckless suite of software (dwm, slstatus, slock, dmenu, and st) to satisfy my urge for minimalism.

Misc.

One issue I ran into for a while was writing my initramfs. I needed it to be capable of handling LVM2 and decrypting my device. After lots of trial and error, I found the simplest solution was to use Arch Linux's initramfs generating with a custom hook to decrypt the drive after the Kernel is loaded by GRUB (the encryption password can be safely stored in the initramfs since the entire drive is encrypted).

Conclusion

All in all, I love my laptop. While this article has focused on how I modified my laptop, it leaves out a lot of the great qualities it comes with such as a tfouchscreen with a stylus, a fingerprint scanner, a swiveling screen in 2 degrees of freedom, no track pad (only a track point), and so much more.