Tech/libsmbios livecd

From DellLinuxWiki

Fedora 7 includes the useful tool Revisor, which can generate a LiveCD. These are instructions on how to build your own LiveCD that will let you flash the BIOS on nearly all Dell systems.

Note: Your resulting LiveCD will contain the Fedora logos unless you also follow the instructions for replacing the fedora-logos package. Honoring Fedora trademark guidelines, you may not publicly redistribute your resulting LiveCD without replacing these logos. Furthermore, if you publicly redistribute your image, honoring the open source licenses of the packages in Fedora, you must provide copies of the source code for all open source / Free software components included in the LiveCD. Revisor is adding functionality to simplify this process.

First, have a Fedora 7 i386 system handy. Then install Revisor.

# yum install revisor

Revisor requires a few configuration files to work from. Add the following section to /etc/revisor/revisor.conf:

[f7-i386-dell]
main = /etc/revisor/conf.d/dell-f7-i386.conf
product_name = Fedora
product_path = Fedora
iso_basename = F
comps = /etc/revisor/comps-f7.xml
architecture = i386
version = 7
getsource = 0

You also need a /etc/revisor/conf.d/dell-f7-i386.conf file, which is the same as the f7-i386.conf file, but with the following repositories added:

[fwupdate]
name=fwupdate
baseurl=http://fwupdate.com/repo/firmware/cross-distro
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://fwupdate.com/repo/firmware/RPM-GPG-KEY-fwupdate

[dell-software]
name=dell-software
baseurl=http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/fc7/i386
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/RPM-GPG-KEY-dell
       http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/RPM-GPG-KEY-libsmbios

Then you need a kickstart file, /etc/revisor/conf.d/dell-fwupdate.cfg. Start from the sample-live-games.cfg file, editing to add packages as desired, in our case, adding all the system_bios and pci_firmware packages by name. An example file is at http://linux.dell.com/files/revisor/dell-fwupdate.cfg.

Now, run revisor, and wait...

# yes |  revisor --cli --model=f7-i386-dell --kickstart=/etc/revisor/conf.d/dell-fwupdate.cfg --optical

When that finishes, you'll have a bootable LiveCD image in /srv/revisor you can use. Burn that .iso image to a CD, boot that CD, log in as root, open up a terminal, and run:

# update_firmware --yes

That should identify your system and update the BIOS and firmware if it can.

For BIOS updates, you must reboot your system for the actual flash to occur.

# reboot

That's it, your system BIOS and firmware is now up-to-date.