From ceeshek at gmail.com  Sun Oct 25 03:24:44 2009
From: ceeshek at gmail.com (Cees Hek)
Date: Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:24:44 +1100
Subject: Firmware upgrades on Dell XPS Studio 16 (xps1640)
Message-ID: <fd8e28ef0910250124q3e57e772q8da93c960fadbdb9@mail.gmail.com>

I have been trying to update the system BIOS on my Dell Studio 16
laptop with no success.? So it looks like it can be added to the list
of systems on the wiki that are not supported:

http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Firmware/Systems_Missing_RBU

The dell support page mentions in the installation instructions that
you can copy the exe file containing the BIOS upgrade to a dos
bootable disk to allow upgrades for non-windows users, but the exe
file will not run from DOS.? It gives the old "This program cannot be
run in DOS mode".

I tried using biosdisk as well, but that failed as well.

I guess I am going to have to find a spare laptop disk and install
Windows just so I can upgrade the BIOS.  I appreciate all the work
that the Dell Linux team have done to support Linux on Dell hardware,
but it is frustrating to find out after buying this machine that the
Dell website is misleading me about being able to do BIOS upgrades on
non-windows platforms:

http://supportapj.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=au&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R243693&SystemID=STUDIOXPS16&servicetag=&os=LNUX&osl=en&deviceid=17107&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=3&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=1&typeid=-1&dateid=-1&formatid=-1&fileid=352817

cd /boOverall I am very happy with this machine.  It runs Ubuntu with
no troubles at all