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Latest blog entries

De-brick a Thinkpad T530 with coreboot

Recently, my Thinkpad T530 suddenly broke and only flashed the LEDs at power on and then did nothing. I stripped all unnecessary hardware but the behavior did not change. Also, pressing certain key combinations during power on which shall clear remaining charges or BIOS settings did not help. Read more …

AsteroidOS 1.0 Alpha on the Asus Zenwatch 3

In a previous article, I published a small userspace image and Linux kernel for the Zenwatch 3 that enables root access with SSH over USB on the watch. By now, I reached my initial goal to get AsteroidOS, the alternative Android Wear operating system, running on the Zenwatch 3. Similar to SailfishOS and Ubuntu Touch, AsteroidOS uses the original Android kernel - a patched Linux kernel - with a GNU/Linux userspace that, in turn, also uses some of the original, closed-source Android libraries to access certain hardware like the GPU. As the Android libraries expect a different software ecosystem, e.g., a different C library called bionic, we cannot simply call the Android libraries from within a common GNU/Linux application. Instead, we need an additional software layer that translates between the Android and the common GNU/Linux world. This layer is called libhybris. Read more …