Hacks for domestic appliances

I have an “oldish” Thinkpad X31, which I started to use for Haiku software development (nothing big, just some hobby, really).

It originally came with an IBM ip2100 wifi card, which is “b” only, and since my shiny Apple router supports “g” (and “n”), I decided to upgrade the wifi card for at least a “g” standard  card.

After some reading and googling I found out the an IBM ipw2200ABG card would be a good fit, so I went out shopping and got one for less then 20 USD.

Disassembling the X31 was easy, practically 4 screws at the bottom, and the keyboard was easy to remove, underneath there was the minipci slot with the wifi card. I quickly replaced it (do not forget to remove the battery beforehand), and started the laptop, then the nasty surprise came.

1802: Unauthorized network card is plugged in - Power off and remove the miniPCI network card.

Well. Something is not good. I found the page dedicated to this problem. Basically IBM has a whitelist in their BIOS, which limits the wifi cards work in their machines. Not nice.

There are 3 soultions.

1. get an IBM approved wifi card (difficult to get one, and more expensive)

2. hack the BIOS to enable all minipci cards

3. hack the CMOS to enable minipci cards other than the ones on the whitelist

I decided to take the 3rd option as the least risky one.

I found a site, which offer solution to this. A bootable CD (or floppy), which has a small utility, called no-1802. Downloaded the CD, booted up the machine with no wifi card inserted, and issued the command at the prompt, no-1802. Reboot.

When I restarted the machine (with the ipw2200 wifi card inserted), I had no error message, so I hoped that it works.

And indeed it does work. I confirmed it with an Ubuntu live CD, connected to my home wifi network, and tested with some internet pages. Nice.

So, it is recommended to do, while there are two drawbacks.

1. the small led (which shows the wifi activity) does not work. It is a known problem.

2. second, unfortunately Haiku does not like the 2200 wifi card for some reason. it should work, but it refuse to load, if the card is installed and the firmware is extracted. But again, it is confirmed within Ubuntu that the cards performs just fine.

UPDATE (22/07/2010): the 2200 wifi does work in Haiku, but the wired lan needs to be disabled!

I have an old (by old, I mean ancient for IT standards, more than 10 years old) laptops, an IBM Thinkpad 600x. It used to be the king of laptops, back in 1999. It served well for business, then survived various Linux distributions on the hardware (starting with Debian 2.2, that was some time ago).

This is the grandpa of the laptops, still a beauty:

I have not used it for a long time, but now, that Haiku OS is maturing fast, I decided to clean the dust from the machine and give it a try.

After switching it on, it greeted me with error 161 and 163, which after some goggling, turns out to be the error code for a dead cmos battery. Where one can buy – especially in an Eastern-European country – a cmos battery for a more than ten years old laptop? For a reasonable price, of course.

At the local Tesco! What? Yes!

I found some sites, where people discuss the very same problem, and there is a brilliant and simple solution – involves some light hacking.

The cmos battery in the Thinkpad 600x resides in the compartment, where the ram is located. Only one screw and easy to take it out.

It turns out that the cmos battery is nothing, but a standard, so called cr2025, 3 volts battery, available just every shop selling batteries. It has some special connectors, but thats all, as seen in the picture.

Nice! I picked up two cr2025 batteries for a mere 2 USD at the local store and started the surgery process.

I had to cut away the yellow, plastic coating, then the two electrical leads were stamped onto the surface of the battery. Not so difficult to remove it all.

I took the brand new battery, inserted the leads carefully (red goes to positive), used some electrical tape to fix them to both surfaces, than used som more to make sure that I isolate the little thing totally.

Putting it back was a breeze, and then switched the laptop on, which literally had a new pacemaker now.

First boot of course for setting date and time, then reboot, twice and then… no more error 161, 163 nonsense. Yeah!

So, reviving and old IBM Thinkpad 600x with a consumer battery is unexpected, but turns out to be rather easy.