 Hi everybody. So I'm a current developer, I'm like the program in C, I'm the maintainer for a little touchscreen library project. Also I work for ginseng algorithms systems in Austria who support my trip to Fossum this year which is awesome. And I started this little project and I hope you all want to install Kobut on your laptops today. Also I use Tor to the 2. I use it every day, it's great. Don't underestimate that. So I think a project has really won, you know, when you use it as a verb. So in that sense let's curl an image and Kobut your laptop. We're talking about the X230 only here but that's just because it happens to be the laptop I own. There's no reason at all why we wouldn't port this project to any laptop supported by Kobut today. That is a totally useless slide, you know. The laptop, you can look it up, it's old, I like it. So we're going to use the Kobut project. That's all we're going to use. What's that? It's a replacement for your BIOS. It can build a replacement for your proprietary BIOS. It's free software, it's great, it does hardware initialization and is built in a quite modular way so you can choose how it looks to you. It can look like UEFI system to you and you choose that using so-called payloads. So just like there's the Linux kernel and most of us would leave the job of configuring the thing, figure out a working configuration and build the thing to distributors. And that's nothing different with Kobut. So it's all there with how to configure, how to build plus with Kobut you won't build an x86 binary you run, you build a binary image you would then figure out how to flash to your motherboards, flash it. So there are Kobut distributions right now. One is called Libre Boot. You might have heard of that. There's the Hats Firmware project, which is an awesome project. You have to check that out and there's our project. There are more distributions actually. I've heard of one, I can't remember the name right now today. They all release binary images you can grab and they are ready to run on your motherboards SPI flash. So how do we fit into this picture? You and you will see that it's a really boring project. So I'm sorry but you are in a really boring talk. Because that's the first Git commit of our project and all it is is me back-upping my configuration for my Kobut build. I honestly thought that that's it and that repository is done. I will change the config a few times. I'll change a reflash but I was wrong. So we try to make Kobut as easy to install for you as possible and once you have that installed as easy to use as possible. Really boring actually. So as soon as we support the thing you shouldn't have any excuse anymore to run the vendor bias. So we include a build system, we build report useably, which is important when you release binary images. We don't expect you to trust a random binary. We don't offer any security feature whatsoever at run time. All you could argue is that we build from free software which is great and we give you the opportunity to to flash your your system anytime you want to a known good state. But you cannot say anything more. For more take a look at the Hearth project. That's awesome. What do we mean by easy to install? Well for these laptops usually for first time installation of Kobut you need to disassemble the thing. Unfortunately but that's the case. So we try to document this as good as possible. So if you don't know what to do after reading our read me we have done something wrong. We even try to tell you where you can buy this clip or whatever and how to connect and whatever. In this case using Raspberry Pi in case you have that lying around. If you don't we offer a different we support a different option that is even cheaper. But once you have that connected for your first time installation all you have to do with our project is run one script per chip. And that's it in this case we have two chips and two scripts top and bottom and you're done and reboot and Kobut is what once you have it flashed and running. It should be easy to use and it is we simply use C bias and that's nothing except when you press escape like it says here it gives you a boot menu and that's it. In case you have a USB live stick or something connected you you can choose to boot that. So I mentioned we support the X230 only right now but I would gladly help you port it over to your Kobut subvolta laptop. It's really easy you just need a little bit of time. Also for the X230 we release two different images. So you have the choice between basically that's ugly looking visually but built from 100% free software except for the Intel microcode update binary or looking really awesome and really beautiful but including the Intel's proprietary video bias as part of the build. But also I have to say that this might as well be just a configuration issue and we can improve this. I'm glad for any help there if you have a better configuration than we have. Please say so. So what do we release? We just try to release about once a month and just take Kobut's master branch at the day of the release. That's actually how we are supposed to use the Kobut project. We take the latest version of all the components we include which is C-Bias and Intel's microcode update which results in some upstream work. We ensure that the latest versions of these components are in Kobut's repositories so this sometimes needs to patch Kobut. Patches are usually accepted really quickly. Also when we do a release and test on our laptop we contribute to Kobut's board status project that also is part of Kobut repository which results in this supported motherboards wiki page you can search for. So in this way we make sure that the laptop we support will be supported, will stay supported by Kobut. That's infected. So I wanted to do a little demo until I figured you won't see anything when I reboot so I record it. So what we have here is just a release tab all extracted and that's it with some preparations from our documentation. We run a X230 script that's called X230 because you run it on the X230 you want to install code that's our main script for updating the skull's image when you already have your first time installation done you know when you're already running one but it's really just executing the script and choosing which version which of the two set images you want to flash. In this case I'm using the free one which you will see in a second doesn't look very well but there are people who value that a lot that you don't include binaries. So you see we don't use even Grub doesn't see the correct frame buffer size but as soon as Linux takes over things are fine. So functional device it's okay but we can do better. It just should be easy for you to get something working as quickly as possible and it's as seamlessly as possible. So I do the same thing again essentially with the other image and and a really nice person from GitHub recently drew a logo for us we have included now and you will see that. So here you see the scripts there are scripts called external run that are only for your first time installation process because you don't run it on the machine you are installing corporate to you run it externally. So that's basically the concept except there are just strips the images and documentation and that's it. We flash that so and you see after your first time installation process we by default provide you with a setup that you don't need to disassemble your laptop. You can update just by flashing online if you will and that's it and with that I can even take questions. Thank you very much. I was wondering why you need to make a physical access to the chip for the first installation while you are able to do it by software after that. The reason for that is in this particular case there are multiple different mechanisms flash chips provide for write protection in this case there's an Intel file description a part of the Intel file description that needs to be changed in order to disable this write protection but yeah we won't be allowed to access this to write to this memory until in this case you flip this bit and you can do this professionally externally there are so many different other write protection mechanisms but in this case it's doable but you need to disassemble. Is there any possibility to edit more settings in the BIOS like for example like virtualization settings RAM or any other thing like we see in common BIOS in an proprietary BIOS? Is there a possibility to have settings you can change as part of yes actually there is and we include a core boot payload that does exactly that. We include that by default now you can do some basic settings like USB power always on and some settings you can do. But you have to flash it again to apply the new settings? No you don't. Okay thanks. All right I have one minute left one last question this laptop's flash the question was how big the image is we do a little trick here we release an image that is four meg but the flash chip is actually 16 meg a 12 meg sorry so we just we just put the thing into our tower wall that we flash because we select the region we flash you know. Can the flash be made read only after flashing? Yes we support yes we support choosing to right protect to again right re-protect the whole thing as part of our script just as a command line option yeah but then you were forced to disassemble but you said that in this closed version there was a fiber for BIOS from Intel do you have a source version of the file BIOS and is it a full file BIOS I have no idea about this BIOS thing. Okay a replacement for the for Intel's video BIOS. Yes exactly. That's a that's part of the CBIOS project and that's called C VGA BIOS that's a part of the CBIOS project they built that they write that. Okay so that's not something different that is totally for example I remember that that was always the female issues with some drivers and something and it's something different completely. I'm not sure I got that but it's it's it's really a replacement for Intel's video BIOS it's really a drop in replacement by the CBIOS project yeah. Thank you thank you for the questions like let's thank the speaker again