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Good news for Dell laptops owners: latest BIOS images can be loaded with Ubuntu, Fedora or CentOS! It was announced at official Direct2Dell blog by Matt Domsch. In a nutshell to get new BIOS installed while you're running Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty, 7.10 Gutsy, or Hardy just enable Universe repository in sources.list (System -> Administration -> Software Sources) and run under root (sudo -s):

wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
aptitude install firmware-addon-dell
aptitude install $(bootstrap_firmware -a)
update_firmware


The first command enables Dell’s Ubuntu repository as well as downloads and installs GPG key for this repository. As you might guess, restart is needed after last command is done (keep fingers crossed)

Please note that detailed instructions on how to update BIOS with Ubuntu (or other Linux distro) and firmware-tools developed by Dell are here:

We are releasing this project in the hopes of moving the industry towards a more scalable and friendly way to update BIOS and Firmware for systems.

Respect to Dell and it’s Linux engineers!