[PLUG] Laptop Sees Half Installed Memory

[Rich Shepard]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2011, Russell Johnson wrote:

> Unfortunately, the bios installer is all Windows based. I could loan you a
> 80gb laptop drive to restore the original OS, do the upgrade and then swap
> your linux drive back in. Assuming the system uses sata drives.

Russell, Mike, Dan, et al.:

   While the laptop is upgrading everything to Slackware-current (the
soon-to-be-released 13.37) and it's raining so I have an excuse to put off
the yard work and gutter cleaning, I've dug more deeply into Dell's hidden
OSS world.

   For the record, they have this site
          <http://linux.dell.com/wiki/index.php/Repository/firmware>

explicitly to "... provide a mechanism which can be used to update the BIOS
and other firmware on our systems. We used the mkbiosrepo.sh script in the
dell-repo-tools package to build a repository of all the BIOS and firmware
images available on http://support.dell.com (only the latest version for
each system is in the repository). Now our systems' BIOS and firmware stays
up to date automatically by the same method our operating system software
stays up to date."

    They go on to write, "This [sic] *only* support for firmware updates that
you get from this site is via the mailing list. If you call Dell phone
support, it is unlikely that they will even know this exists, and under no
circumstances would they be able to fix any problems with it. On the other
hand, the developers of this software are on the mailing list, and will
likely be able to look at and fix your problem."

   So, here goes my weekend.

Rich