Hello, I’ve never done any kind of blog / documentation on any of my personal projects before. So as of today (4/23/26) I have decided to change that. The project I have chosen to write about isn’t particularly new, but it also isn’t finished. So here it is: Lupus’ journey into making an effective systemd-less linux laptop for my intended usecases, while also completing all the hardware mods I’ve always wanted to do for my Lenovo Thinkpad T530. I have no idea how to format this journey properly in writing so I’ll start off with listing what I want to do with this big chungus of a notebook.

My goals for use as of now are pretty clear:

• I want to have a deticated machine that can do all of the following independently. There must be no reliance on a cellphone hotspot for internet outside home or public wifi. In fact, there must be no connection between this laptop and my phone at all, including connected online accounts. Any data I need to access with this thinkpad must also not rely on cloud storage services at all.

• I want this machine to be able to operate ham radio and SDR equipment. A good amount of ham software is available on linux and the kernel generally supports most ham hardware, so I will only be running linux on this machine.

• It seems contradictory to ham communications, but I want this thinkpad to remain detached from my real identity. This is not particularly easy to achieve, so the level of “detachment” I aim to achieve would be only covering identification over the internet. I do not need the physical hardware to be clean of my fingerprints and be impossible to trace how I bought it. It’s not like I run an underground minecraft hacking group and need to hide from the glowies chasing me down. This level of detachment is just because I want to do it, not that I need to.

• Finally, I just want it to be enjoyable to use within the usage constraints I have placed upon this old notebook. It might not be used all the time, but it has specific tasks that I only want this machine to do, and I want to not make myself suffer doing that.

I’ll start with what major changes I’ve done to this chungus so far, because I did a lot.
I flashed the ivyrain bios exploits to the T530, thus removing all the stupid hardware whitelists, unlocking advanced firmware settings, and letting me permanently deactivate intel ME. Without the outstanding work of the ivyrain developers I couldn’t make any of this work.

I upgraded the RAM from 4GB DDR3 to 12GB DDR3L. Might eventually buy matching DDR3L sticks to max it at 16GB, but whatever.

I upgraded the CPU from the modest dual core intel i5-3320M to the much beefier quad core intel i7-3740QM. It is possible to install faster CPU’s, but that means bumping up from a 45W chip to a 55W+ chip. I wanted power consumption to be manageable so I stuck with the 3740QM at the stock TDP and clock multiplier (because ivyrain is cool and lets you overclock compatable CPU’s if you wanted to do that).

I upgraded the wireless NIC from the still useable but not great intel centrino N-6205 (Wifi 4 with 2.4Ghz band only) to the much newer intel AX210, which I suprisingly found with a miniPCIe variant. The AX210 has Wifi 6E with access to 2.4Ghz, 5Ghz, and 6Ghz bands, 2x2 MIMO, WPA3-SAE capability, and integrated Bluetooth 5.4. Unfortunately, the BT 5.4 is nonfunctional since T530’s miniPCIe wifi card slot apparently has no USB 2.0 bus.

I performed the classic 7-row keyboard swap by installing the thinkpad EC firmware patch and installing a genuine 7-row keeb, which is amazing to type on. As of now I still have to dremel the metal tabs on the keyboard down to make it fit in the T530 palmrest properly but that’s for later.

I obviously am also not using the original 2.5” SATA HDD. This thinkpad didn’t even include the HDD when I bought it anyways. Right now I am using a shitty 128GB Dogfish mSATA SSD installed to the WWAN card slot, which Lenovo was kind enough to fit a SATA bus into for some reason. (I think it’s only SATA1 but hey, it works!)

Not a permanent mod but I did buy one of those funny adapters that let you securely fit a 2.5” SSD or HDD into the 5.25” 12.7mm ultrabay because they were cheap on ebay. I don’t have it installed currently since I do infact use the optical drive.

Finally I bought a genuine lenovo thinkpad mini dock series 3 (one of the variants with the USB 3.0 port in it), which has a shitload of ports all of them are actually useful for what I want to connect. It even came with the set of keys to operate the lock + dock mounting mechanism which is great.

With the hardware and firmware changes listed, I’ll go into my OS install, which isn’t nearly as impressive. Actually since it’s very unimpressive and not heavily configured yet I’ll go into what flavor of Linux I choose to install and why.

I was going to install Debian 13 as the base OS since Debian is an excellent distro with shitloads of documentation and packages available. But… I had discovered the news that the systemd developers had written age-verification code to their repo and apparently intend to publish it to mainstream, which gave me a reason to finally look into whatever the anti-systemd crowd had been warning us about for the past decade or so. Given I wanted a reasonably privacy-oriented system that will last into the forseeable future, I decided fuck it I don’t need systemd anymore and the feds who apparently want to “protect the children” can go suck on my pp, since they definitely have never protected the children, if you know what I mean. I am not submitting my ID to use a computer I own and access the internet I pay too much money just to be able to use. I’m not letting the government or the corpos see and record even more of my life that isn’t their business. Additionally, I do not trust the government or the corpos to not give my ID away to whoever shoves money up their asses or hacks into their servers, because they are kind of known for events like that. Ok enough ranting and onto linux-ing. I did some brief research on linux distros that do not ship with systemd by default.

The first candidate was Gentoo, which I already know a bit about but never used before. While Gentoo seems extremely interesting and powerful, I did not choose it for my thinkpad because I want to experiment on Gentoo more before I make it a big project. So Gentoo is out of the picture for now.

The next candidate was Artix Linux, which is based on Arch but without systemd. When I was looking into Artix I found a recent youtube video about I2P from Mental Outlaw’s channel that actually covered Artix a little bit. In his video, he mentioned and pictured that the Artix Linux devs claim they will never implement age verification code to their project, which was very promising. In his video he also showed that someone had already established a full Artix package mirror on the I2P network, which would theoretically make the OS much more private to use if you set it up to only retreive packages from that mirror. I actually did try to install Artix on a different thinkpad I have from a USB stick, but for some reason it didn’t want to boot the Artix live ISO. Given I always want to rip my eyes out trying to use plain Arch Linux every time I try it out I gave up on that pretty quick.

Given the first two candidates weren’t very ideal, I searched for strictly Debian-based distros. Because Debian is always the answer and I don’t care about getting bleeding edge packages and kernels default since all that shit always breaks on me and I can literally just install new packages and kernels on Debian by adding different repositories or I can just install a package with flatpak if I really wanted to. So I did what I thought was reasonable and choose a distro that is as close to actual Debian as possible, Which is Devuan. On the Devuan.org website, the devs say they aim to have a distro that doesn’t ship with systemd (they have an ISO download for like every init except systemd which is cool) but also is very close to base Debian to be mostly compatible with anything available on Debian. The latest stable version of Devuan as of now is Devuan 6 Excalibur, which is based off Debian 13 Trixie. So that’s literally perfect for me.
I downloaded the DVD ISO installer from their official torrent links, burned the ISO to a DVD like it’s the 2000s all over again, and then put the DVD into my Thinkpad’s ODD tray and it booted right up to a very familiar Debian TUI installer. The install is not too involved. I just put everything into a single ext4 partition and encrypted the disk with LUKS. I choose XFCE as the desktop environment and OpenRC as the init system. I originally installed it with KDE and sysVinit, but that was a mistake and I’m not explaining why. Just don’t use KDE on non-systemd installs.

After installing Devuan, I kept the installer DVD inserted and installed some common packages off the DVD using apt-cdrom, which Devuan includes in the base install. Why? Becuase optical disc drives make cool sounds and it does save a minuscule amount of bandwidth so yeah. Anyways there are five notable packages I installed as soon as I could: macchanger, wireguard, tor, apt-transport-tor. and i2pd. Macchanger just changes device MAC address randomly depending on how you configure it, so it’s harder to track this machine’s hardware. Wireguard is a VPN tunnel package that allows you to use wireguard tunnels as a linux network interface. Since I want to have what I do on this machine private, a VPN implementation is an obvious step to take to encrypt all traffic between you and wherever the endpoint is. This usually just matters for keeping your traffic hidden from the ISP you use, since I indeed have gotten that scary letter in the mail from my ISP from borrowing software without one. Tor is uhhh well.. Tor. Basically makes it harder for your device, location, and traffic from being tracked by putting all of your traffic through what is essentially a proxy chain that encrypts your data again every time it hops from one proxy to the next. Tor was originally meant to handle just clearweb traffic through itself but there’s also special servers inside Tor using unique anonymous .onion web domains that require no identification to get. It does more than this but yeah. Apt-transport-tor is a package that just lets APT use package repositories hosted in the tor network (those yummy .onions). This is useful because the developers of Devuan actually host an official package repository on tor. I2pd is a package that lets you use most of the i2p network services. I’m not as well versed with i2p as I am with tor but i2p claims to be more private and just generally better designed than tor since i2p has slightly different intended use.

Okay so I’m running out of energy to type all this right now so I’ll wrap this up soon. For the VPN I am using I choose mullvad, because apparently mullvad is the only real VPN out there right now. I was going to use an offshore VPS as a VPN, which I’ve experimented with before, but honestly for 5 dollars a month with the ability to pay in various crypto or even mailing cash I couldn’t beat what Mullvad has to offer. This doesn’t mean I would trust Mullvad with all of my data but so long as I keep the “seperate identity for this machine” mindset I don’t think Mullvad is going to get all my important data off me. As far as additional privacy for the internet goes I opted to not route all my traffic over tor with the tor package since frankly I don’t need to. Darkweb is very slow and high latency so I’m not going to use it for tasks I don’t have to run through it. With i2pd I’ve only gone as far as configuring it to run in openRC at boot and got the i2p HTTP proxy configured. I plan to try building a Devuan i2p mirror on a VPS but I might not go through with it unless the community actually wants it.

I forgot to talk about the hardware I still want to add to the thinkpad but that’s for part two of this journey. Have a good night everyone.