One workshop, one person, a few machines a month.

Durabo is run by [FIRST NAME LAST NAME], in Lyon, France. A student, working alone, registered as a sole trader. There is no team, no warehouse, no customer service department — just a bench, an SPI programmer and a register.

That is a constraint, and it is written plainly across this site rather than hidden behind a corporate "we". A buyer who asks a question at 11 pm gets an answer in the following days, not within the hour.

On an ordinary laptop, the first code that runs at power-on is a proprietary BIOS whose contents nobody outside the manufacturer knows. It runs before the operating system, above it, and the operating system cannot inspect it.

coreboot replaces that code with a free implementation whose source is public and reproducible. SeaBIOS takes over to boot the system. This is not magic: the CPU microcode stays proprietary, and coreboot does not make a machine invulnerable. What it changes is who is allowed to read what runs before everything else.

The Intel Management Engine is the second problem. It is a separate processor inside the chipset with access to memory and network, running even when the machine is off. It cannot be removed entirely — without it the machine shuts down after thirty minutes. me_cleaner cuts its partition down to what is strictly needed to boot, which removes most of its surface.

The honest wording: the Intel ME is neutered, not removed. Any shop writing "ME removed" on a Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge machine is either mistaken or lying.

A pleasant side effect: coreboot drops Lenovo's Wi-Fi card whitelist. That is what makes it possible to fit an Atheros card driven by ath9k, which works with no non-free firmware at all.

The X230, T420 and T430 sit in an unusual spot: recent enough to use every day, old enough to be fully documented and repairable.

• Corebootable without desoldering. A SOIC-8 clip is enough, the chip stays on the board.
• Documented by Lenovo. Official hardware maintenance manual, published FRU numbers for every part.
• Parts still available. Keyboards, panels, cables, fans, batteries: all still findable, new or used.
• Actually openable. Phillips screws, no glue, no rivets. A user can open their own machine without breaking it.
• No surprises under Linux and BSD. These platforms have been supported for more than ten years. Nothing to work around.

A rebuilt laptop is also the best environmental answer available: most of a computer's footprint is in its manufacture, not its use. Reuse beats recycling, which beats new by a long way.

• No volume. A few machines a month. When the machines page is empty, there is nothing to sell — not a stock being replenished.
• No 24/7 support. Replies within a few days. Nobody is on call.
• No race to the bottom. The price floor is parts cost plus €80. Below that a machine becomes a donor, not a product.
• No T480 for now. Corebootable via deguard since late 2024, but Thunderbolt is unsupported, the TPM is disabled, and the EC firmware must be at a specific version before flashing. The first one stays in the workshop.
• No FHD mod on the X230. It needs an interposer board and breaks brightness control. It has no place on a machine that is sold.
• No battery-life promises. Battery capacity is measured and published. Any runtime quoted is an observed order of magnitude, nothing more.

Machines ship anywhere in the European Union, tracked and signed for, for €15 on top of the listed price. Your national consumer protections apply on top of the French ones described under Warranty.

Two things to know before ordering. Keyboards are AZERTY unless a swap is agreed beforehand — say so before you pay, not after. And support is written in French and English by the same one person; everything else on this site is a translation of the French original, which remains the contractual reference.

The procedure does not change from one machine to the next. Here it is in full, once and for all.

1. Entry in the second-hand goods register, serial photographed.
2. Full strip-down. The original drive is pulled and physically destroyed — it never leaves with the machine and is never reused.
3. SPI chip read in two passes compared by SHA-256. Nothing is written until the two reads match. The factory BIOS dump is kept.
4. me_cleaner -S over the ME region, coreboot built with SeaBIOS, flashed, then ten consecutive cold boots.
5. Hardware refurbishment: thermal paste, fan, memory, drives, CMOS battery, missing parts.
6. Battery charged over three full cycles, then capacity measured and published.
7. Debian stable with full-disk encryption, then 24 h burn-in.
8. Every port tested one by one, panel checked on five flat backgrounds.
9. Photos of the unit, page published.

This list is the site's implicit contract. If a step was skipped on a machine, it says so on that machine's page.

Nothing is collected on this site: no account, no cart, no analytics cookie, no third-party script. The pages are static files.

Payment happens on a Stripe page. Delivery address and card details are handled by Stripe, not by Durabo, which never sees a card number.

What is kept on the Durabo side is limited to what the law requires: invoices for accounting, and the second-hand goods register that French law imposes on anyone reselling used goods. There is no customer database. What is not stored cannot leak.