Update HP Insyde Bios

April 18, 2011 · Posted in Various · 5 Comments

Almost a year ago, I purchased an HP Pavilion dm1-1110ev. Recently, I noticed that a new BIOS was available but sadly HP offered a windows 7 executable and nothing else. To be honest, I would expect HP to be much more Linux friendly, since hplip driver has been working fine for me since forever. Anyway, since only a single windows executable file was available, I had to figure out a way to flash it to my laptop which runs Gentoo on it.

Idea #1: Install Windows-7 on external drive and use it to flash BIOS

No. It seems like windows 7 cannot be installed in removal USB drive? Fail!?? Yes indeed. There are some workarounds here and there, but honestly, I didn’t want to spend my vacations on trying random stuff.

Idea #2: Use flash utility via FreeDOS

The supplied executable file is actually a compressed file containing all the necessary files to perform the BIOS flash. However, the provided Insyde flash utility cannot be executed in DOS environment. Sad but true. After googling a couple of hours, I found the flashit utility which can be used to flash Insyde BIOS in DOS environment. So the task was easy:

1) Create bootable FreeDOS USB or CD

2) Put flashit and bios rom image on it

3) boot

4) flashit.exe <bios-image.fd> \all

5) Enjoy your new BIOS :)

I wonder why HP couldn’t provide a non-windows way to flash your BIOS. This is just stupid. Thanks!

Disclaimer: Messing around with BIOS can brick your hardware. Think twice before doing it.

Tags: BIOS, HP, Insyde, netbook

Life update

April 13, 2011 · Posted in Gentoo · 2 Comments

Yes I am still alive :)

Almost two months since my last blog entry, yet I have nothing really special to talk about. Life is moving forward, University courses almost finished and dissertation work has just started ( no progress so far which is quite frustrating ). I want to find some time to write about my experiences in UK so far, but it is not the time yet. Since most of you read my blog to get some updates regarding the Gentoo-land here it is:

AMD64 stable tree is in a good state ( w00t ). I am quite happy about that. Thanks to our ATs we try to keep our bug load below 50 :). We are constantly looking forward for new testers so feel free to contact us if you want to see your name in this page

The backlog for new developers is quite small. We currently have ~10 new developers in the queue and only half of them are not assigned to a recruiter yet. So now it is the time to jump the gap.

Let me remind to you, once again, the concept of “Proxy maintainers” which might not be known to you. As Dane recently posted, if you want to see your ebuilds on portage, feel free to contact me and I will commit it for you :)

I promise to find some more time to write about everything but I really have to back to studying. Cu soon!

Tags: Gentoo