Cyconet Blog » hardware-hacking

BIOS Bootsplash for Thinkpad (T41)

cyco — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:29:19 +0000

On thinkwiki.org I found 2 articles how to get rid of the IBM BIOS Bootsplash and your own working. One for Windows and one for Linux.

At first, you need 1ruj35us.exe or newer. With

# cabextract -F “*.IMG” 1ruj35us.exe

you will get a “1RUJ35US.IMG”, which is a floppy image.

Next you need to create a 16 color 640×480 BMP and save it as “/tmp/logo.bmp”. Now we need to mount the floppy, let the “logo.bmp” take place there and generate a “logo.mod”:

# mkdir /tmp/floppy
# mount -o loop,umask=000 /tmp/1RUJ35US.IMG /tmp/floppy
# cp /tmp/logo.bmp /tmp/floppy/ && cd /tmp/floppy/
# wine prepare.exe logo.scr
# cd && umount /tmp/floppy/

If you don’t have wine, but a running windows in place, use Virtual Floppy Drive like described in the Windows instruction to get the picture on the disk image.
Now you only need to burn a CD(-RW) with “1RUJ35US.IMG” as boot image. This can be easily done with k3b or on console:

# mkisofs -b 1RUJ35US.IMG 1RUJ35US.IMG| cdrecord \
dev= -

You only need to boot your Thinkpad from CD(-RW) by pressing F12 on boot and flashing new firmware with customer image. You are done! My bootsplash image can be found here, an ‘unbranded’ one here.

We got some Linksys WRTSL54GS imported from US

cyco — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 11:14:43 +0000

DonÃƒâ€šÃ‚Â´t ask how, but we got some units to europe.

The first thing we does, was to install openwrt and to try debridge the switch to have multiple interfaces instead. We was able to remove ports from the switch, but cant create additional working vlans like on WRT54G. So at this point its useless for our purpose. But we will start exploring as son as possible we have a running serial console.

Adding Serial Mod to Linksys WRT54G (V2.0)

cyco — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 12:37:41 +0000

Today I was finally soldering the Serial Mod I got from Stephanie Lange and got the serial console working on a WRT54G V2.0 model.

Welcome to minicom 2.1

OPTIONS: History Buffer, F-key Macros, Search History Buffer, I18n
Compiled on Mar 29 2005, 09:39:09.

Press CTRL-A Z for help on special keys

BusyBox v1.00 (2005.07.08-18:02+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.

_______ ________ __
| |.—–.—–.—–.| | | |.—-.| |_
| – || _ | -__| || | | || _|| _|
|_______|| __|_____|__|__||________||__| |____|
|__| W I R E L E S S F R E E D O M
WHITE RUSSIAN (RC1) ——————————-
* 2 oz Vodka Mix the Vodka and Kahlua together
* 1 oz Kahlua over ice, then float the cream or
* 1/2oz cream milk on the top.
—————————————————
root@gollum:/# AT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4 &c1 E1 Q0
/bin/ash: c1: not found
root@gollum:/# /bin/ash: AT: not found

[1] + Done(127) AT S7=45 S0=0 L1 V1 X4
root@gollum:/#
root@gollum:/#
root@gollum:/# reboot The system is going down NOW !!
watchquag Sending SIGTERM to all processes.
Sending SIGKILL to all processes.
Please stand by while rebooting the system.
Restarting system.
Please stand by while rebooting the system…