June 8, 2026
Boot drama on a black brick
Porting the ThinkPad X61 to Coreboot
Vintage laptop fans are losing it over a hacker, AI, and one very stubborn ThinkPad
TLDR: Arthur got an old ThinkPad X61 running with open startup software after reverse-engineering the original system, with AI helping move things along. Commenters were split between cheering this as a win for user control, debating what’s legally allowed, and flexing their absurdly deep ThinkPad obsession.
A longtime ThinkPad superfan just pulled off the kind of project that makes old-laptop devotees cheer, argue, and immediately check auction sites. Arthur documented how he brought coreboot—an open replacement for a computer’s hidden startup software—to the ancient but beloved ThinkPad X61, a machine many fans treat like a sacred relic. The extra plot twist? He says modern AI helped speed up the reverse-engineering work, turning what could have been months of pain into something actually manageable.
And the comments? Absolute catnip. One of the loudest reactions was pure celebration: people calling the work "really, really cool" and "very necessary" because they’re tired of being locked out of the devices they own. There’s a bigger dream bubbling under the thread too: users fantasizing about a future where more gadget firmware is open, easier to update, and not controlled by manufacturers forever. In other words, the crowd wasn’t just praising one hack—they were treating it like a tiny rebellion.
But there was also nerdy courtroom drama. One commenter jumped in to swat down the idea that Americans can’t legally reverse engineer hardware, basically yelling, "yes we are?" and waving IBM PC clone history like a receipt. Meanwhile, the nostalgia crowd showed up with full collector-energy: one person asked what operating system to run on their own X61, while another delivered a frankly unhinged makeover list involving screen swaps, speakers, upgraded internals, and logo surgery. The running joke of the whole post is that ThinkPad collecting isn’t a hobby anymore—it’s a condition.
Key Points
- •Arthur Heymans documents a project to port the Lenovo ThinkPad X61 to coreboot.
- •The X61 platform uses a GM965 northbridge and ICH8 southbridge, and the author says no leaked documentation exists for it, making reverse engineering necessary.
- •Earlier attempts using SerialICE and QEMU did not produce a working coreboot port for the X61, according to the article.
- •Heymans says he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 to assist reverse engineering of a vendor BIOS, which helped accelerate the process.
- •Before deeper firmware analysis, he gathered known-good system data with tools including inteltool and lspci, covering items such as ACPI tables, PCI configuration, GPIO pinout, and HDA verb tables.