There’s a pending firmware update that’s been hanging around in my software center for probably a few months now. It’s a firmware update. Clicking the download button next to the item seems to do nothing. Of course, the AC must be plugged in to install this update and I have done that many times now. Other updates will install during shutdown/restart as usual. But this one just doesn’t go away.
Not a huge problem, since it doesn’t affect use of my computer. It’s just been bugging me lately that this thing is always there.
A lot of firmware updates for PCs and laptops cannot be done from within linux. I don’t know what Dell does in this respect.
Some are able to be updated by placing the firmware on a usb device then updating from within the bios setup menu. Others may require a windows environment to perform the update. If you dual boot this is very easy. If you do not have windows installed then there are bootable windows PE options, and I have used Hirens boot PE from here to flash firmware on some devices.
The polkit stuff the fwupd package supplies seems to allow users in the wheel group to perform the actions with root privileges without supplying a password.
I use the command-line fwupd tools on a Dell Latitude. One firmware update was downloaded but not installed until the kernel was updated – I assumed the update was tied to the kernel version.
