Recent modifications on a wiki page

[Andrea Lazzarotto]

2015-10-23 11:43 GMT+02:00 Alberto Salvia Novella <es20490446e at gmail.com>:

> I see that the issue with <
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SamsungBIOS?action=recall&rev=83> is
> that the BIOS update process cannot be completed using Ubuntu, but instead
> you require Windows.
>

This is not correct. The wiki page wrongly states that Samsung does not
provide *any mean to check* what is the latest version of the BIOS
available in order to compare it with what you currently have on your
computer. This false claim has been refuted and a method using only curl or
wget has been included. Not to mention the other two Linux software that do
the exact same check.


> when you will equally need to use that operating system for the upgrade,
> adds no practical value to the documentation.
>

User awareness of what BIOS version he is running versus what is the latest
is already valuable.

Having said that, did you prove that you cannot upgrade without Windows?
The file provided by Samsung contains the BIOS ROM and a flashing tool
exists to flash such ROM using Linux. This has been discussed in our
previous emails. People have reported being able to extract the EXE file to
gain access to the ROM file.

Basically what remains to be done is finding a way to automate the
extraction of the EXE file (maybe via Wine or cabextract... This needs to
be tested) to get access to the ROM file which can be flashed via the AMI
Flasher utility.

It would be different if these instructions clarified how to upgrade by
> using libre software only.
>

You know this is not possible. The BIOS itself is not free software. The
AMI Flasher utility, no matter which platform you run it on, is not free
software. We are discussing about flashing a BIOS in Ubuntu, not using only
free software, which is impossible. If "libre software only" is a
requirement, all the wiki pages about BIOSes except CoreBoot have to be
removed.

By the way, a wiki is a collaborative effort. The material I added includes
most step to gather the required file, the only missing step is the
extraction. The same as in FLOSS, also documentation can be integrated and
extended by other contributors.

Requiring that one person writes *an entire section in one shot* without
any imperfection to accept the material is quite contrary to what a
collaborative effort means.

Best regards

-- 
Andrea Lazzarotto
http://andrealazzarotto.com
http://lazza.dk
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