Facilitation of BIOS flash upgrades. [update-grub]

[Justin Mason]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


Karl Hegbloom writes:
> On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 17:56 -0800, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 04:57:05PM -0800, Karl Hegbloom wrote:
> > 
> > > Great response so far... any input on the implementation decisions I
> > > mention?
> > 
> > I don't much like the idea of creating a partition for this by default.
> > It's a lot of complexity in the default installation, just to make a very
> > rare use case more convenient.

>.....
> What I propose is that a package be created to supply 'memdisk' and then
> a second one (? how should this all be arranged) to supply a freedos
> image.  The freedos one would "Provides" a virtual package, so that
> hardware vendors can provide customized images that already contain the
> BIOS flash utility and BIOS upgrade image.  A generic freedos image
> would contain only basic tools, and a simple script would provide a
> command line interface to copy files into that freedos image, so a local
> admin could easily add the flash utility and image to it.
> 
> I believe that 'update-grub' would need to be extended to support it, so
> that it can be installed, used, then uninstalled again.
> 
> Certainly having a full fledged ;-p DOS partition on an Ubuntu system
> would be silly.  But what do you think of the scheme I outline above?

Sounds like a fantastic idea!

(btw, one issue I've run into is IBM Thinkpad BIOS firmware updates
requiring *Windows* -- by issuing updates as win32 EXEs.  But I don't
think there's any way of dealing with that sanely, and 99% of the firmware
update tools I've encountered other than that have been DOS-based.
so this FreeDOS-image-based fix would work fine.)

- --j.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Exmh CVS

iD8DBQFB8sftMJF5cimLx9ARAqc7AJ9WxkcCxhgdwZs6MON7015qmtHdbwCeP84C
x0ibM7uIMiuCQA79H2jX5qo=
=yH7i
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----