how the heck do I install dell drivers and firmware on fedora 38 workstation?
I have been racking my brain about this for a while now and now I just need some help because I can't figure it out.
So I login to my dell account, punch in my service tag number and it brings up info regarding my specific laptop. There are TONS of firmware and drivers that I believe may be missing? But the issue is, all the files are .exe and thats clearly for windows. They have no fedora or rpm supported drivers or firmware that I could find.
Its crucial because I just got a dell wd19tbs docking station and as per the install instructions, there's a set of firmware/drivers that must be installed prior to setting up the dock
I have lvfs repo enabled, I tried the whole fwupdmgr technique a million times though it never does shit. No firmware or drivers show up in yhe gnome store.... So why is this so complicated? How do I install dell drivers and firmware on a fedora system?
Those drivers are all for Windows, the only useful thing there is the BIOS updates. Like another user said, transfer the BIOS update (exe) to a USB drive and boot to BIOS - Dell has a utility in the BIOS that can extract the necessary files from the exe and apply the update, no Windows needed.
This isn't the one I followed but it is close. You only need the disk formated to fat32 and the dos files listed, as well as the exe file from dell for what you are updating. You boot to it and run the exe file. There is another site somewhere that explains how to make a does boot disk.
This is how I updated my Linux Dell machines bios to new version
That's a dang good question... Any of my machines are dual-booted, so it's never been an issue for me to pop into Windows, install the BS, and pop out. I know there's, like, freedos live disks and stuff like that. Maybe that's a way to go?
Or, if you make a Windows install ISO, add the firmware exe files to that, start up the installer, drop to terminal and install from there?
Any smarter people want to weigh in? I'm curious myself, now.
I was actually reading about maybe using wine? I know nothing about wine other than it allows for windows packages to be downloaded I think... Hmmm so maybe that could work
Wine may unfortunately not work for this, as trying to install drivers and firmware through Wine isn't really a thing AFAIK - because it doesn't have the same level of hardware access. Not to mention, even if you did get drivers installed, it would probably only work within applications that are also installed into that Wine prefix (some people do this for say, peripherals like mice & keyboard that have accompanying software such as iCue for specific games).
Out of curiosity, have you tried the dock even without installing these components? I'm not super familiar with Dell's docks, but I know that others tend to "just work" due to already having drivers baked into the kernel.
For the firmware side of things, I've heard there are various projects that can create a Windows Live USB for you, which you could use to run the firmware installer theoretically.
Most drivers in Linux are installed automatically with the OS and included in the kernel. I wouldn't worry unless some of your hardware is not functional. In which case, this subreddit may be able to help you if you specify what hardware isn't working.