Greetings Bizzaro,
Thank you very much for you most generous contribution, its very kind of you to have documented all your efforts and shared them with us. I can tell you that following your indications I was able to get my x230 running within a Sunday morning. For the last couple of weeks I have been running along with it as a "mobile" workstation and I am very happy with it, so I am looking into solving the final issues I have, and perhaps contribute a little bit to the benefit of all.
Regarding the wireless I tried to rebrand another wireless card to show as an airport extreme, only to hit the wall with the whitelist present in the lenovos. The current solution is to flash another BIOS with the whitelist removed. As you might know, the x230 have signature procedure to prevent unauthorised flashes of the BIOS; I have tried to modify the firmware in the middle of the process to allow my device ID with no success (the version number gets increased but the check remains for the old ID, so I might be missing something).
The other alternatives are to use coreboot (open source BIOS), but with this I loose the hardware encryption of the drive (OPAL), and since it is not possible to use filevault 2 with OSX86, and non-encrypted drive is not an option in my scenario, I have to rely on the Lenovo BIOS. It is possible to flash it if you desolder the chip, flash a modified version and then use another card. You probably know this already, but in any case here it is. Im using the easy solution, external dongle with proprietary driver but I will not stop until this is fixed, even if I have to desolder the chip.
Now, about the bluetooth, I found someone on reddit mentioning that the new bluetooth adapters for the lenovos (4.0 version) work out-of-the-box with OSX and will pass the BIOS whitelist. I will order one and check, if it works I will let you know, the part in question is FRU P/N: 60Y3303. Again, at the moment I am using the easy solution, external dongle with OSX kernel drivers (OOB).
Card reader: Low priority for me, saw some discussions about the fact that this might be a lost cause, so I am leaving this to a very very boring day, ie, I dont care.
Fingerprint reader: My model does not have.
VGA output: I think this might work (pre 10.8, now I am not sure), would be nice if it did, I might give it a go but again, using the easy fix, adapter for the mini-DP port.
Sound issues after sleep: I experience the same thing as you mentioned, but its liveable, your fix works.
Sleep LED: I had some contact with similar issues on other boards and OSs, might be fixeable.
But anyway, this is just sharing some thoughts with you in case you have pursued anything in the last months about these issues.
Three quick questions though:
Brightness control is not working for me. Through any method I have tried. Do you have any hint where the problem might be? I am sure I messed something up, would appreciate a pointer on this.
The trackpad is sometimes slightly temperamental, no? I mean, it works nice, but its not the most rewarding experience. Any hints on that as well?
The screen, aren't you suspecting of some PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) on it? Don't your eyes get tired after a while?
Cheers!
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