In this thread[1] someone suggested Middleton's BIOS, which appears to be a modified version of the Lenovo BIOS for the X61 that removes the hardware whitelist. It doesn't seem to be free, but neither is the BIOS it replaces, and if it makes it possible to install a freedom-respecting WiFi card then I consider it better freedom-wise than keeping the factory BIOS.
The problem is that the necessary files are distributed as a rar archive, and I'm not sure how to extract it using free software. I installed unrar-free, $ sudo apt install unrar-free downloaded the archive, and attempted to extract it. $ unrar x Dual-IDA_SATA-II_Whitelist_SLIC21_ThinkPad_X61_X61s_BIOS_(2.22-1.03).rar Some of the files did extract correctly, but most of them said FAILED. I then tried unar, $ unar Dual-IDA_SATA-II_Whitelist_SLIC21_ThinkPad_X61_X61s_BIOS_\(2.22-1.03\).rar and it seemed that not as many failed, and I got a more descriptive error message for the ones that did fail. BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/$01B2000.FL1 (2316822 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read more data than was available) BIOS update/32-bit/$01B2000.FL1 (2316822 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read more data than was available) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/$01B2000.FL2 (2103350 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read more data than was available) BIOS update/32-bit/$01B2000.FL2 (2103350 B)... Failed! (Attempted to read more data than was available) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f1.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06f1.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f4.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06f4.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f5.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06f5.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06f9.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06f9.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fa.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06fa.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fb.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06fb.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/06fd.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/06fd.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10661.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/10661.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10671.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/10671.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10674.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/10674.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/32-bit/10676.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update/32-bit/10676.HSH (163 B)... Failed! (Wrong checksum) BIOS update + CTRL-FN swap/#1.iso (6387712 B)... Segmentation fault Searching for these two errors ("Attempted to read more data than was available" and "Wrong checksum") and "unar" I was able to find a few bug reports, but none with solutions. Until now I have been fortunate enough to never have had to deal with a rar file, but from what I can gather it is not a free format, and free tools for extracting them like unrar-free and unar can only open some rar files. Does this look like a file that can't be extracted freely, or is there another issue here? Is it worth trying a newer version of unar? Trisquel 8 has 1.9 and it looks like 1.10 is available in Debian testing.
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