As a lifelong Windows user I’ve just for the first time switched to Ubuntu and I’m learning how to navigate the system but I haven’t found an easy way to update my Carbon’s X1 Gen 6 BIOS from its hard disk and would appreciate any advice.
I’d be also happy to hear what I should do as a newcomer to Ubuntu to make my experience with it better and have an easier time overall.
Linux has support for updating various Lenovo models through a piece of software called fwupdmgr. If your laptop is support, it should show up automatically in Gnome Software or similar package managers.
For your laptop, Lenovo has a “Bootable CD” download option for non-Windows users. It’s intended to be written to a CD (but a flash drive will probably also work), for example by using one of those USB DVD drives.
If you don’t have a flash drive for some reason (and I doubt you’ll have a DVD drive in that case), you can try to make the Ubuntu bootloader boot the ISO, though that’s not something for beginners. Here are the official instructions in case you still want to try, but I don’t think I’d bother.
The easiest method may be to contact Lenovo and ask them how to do it. I think they’ll refer you to the bootable ISO. If they don’t make their updates available for anything but Linux, you’re going to have an annoying time.
Spending the five dollars on a flash drive to write the bootable CD to would be worth it in my opinion.
To answer your question: if the software manager doesn’t offer you the firmware update already, the easiest (not necessarily easy) way would be manually adding a bootloader entry to your Grub configuration to boot the update ISO you can download from Lenovos’s website.
The second easiest way would probably be to extract the firmware updater from either the Windows download or the ISO file, extracting the .efi files and the .rom files, placing them on your EFI partition, and using the boot menu to manually boot the firmware updater.
Or, to answer more succinctly: if you don’t get those updates already, there’s no easy way without a bootable medium. Sorry. Tell Lenovo to publish the firmware updates through the standard Linux channels like they do for other laptops.
I just did this for the motherboard on my desktop PC (thanks Intel and your CPU update!) and it requires a clean boot device of some kind to boot into UEFI. It has nothing to do with the OS of the device.
In my case, yeah, I did it from a thumb drive, but I could see making a boot CD that has the bios files on it as well.
OTOH if you have the capability of burning and booting a boot CD it’s probably way easier to just use a thumb drive.
One thing I’ll note, on my motherboard, only using the keyboard to navigate the UEFI menu failed to update. :( I had to connect a physical mouse to run the menus.
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Have you tried
fwupd?Yes but they don’t have my laptop in the device list: no Carbon X1 Gen 6 (only Gen 9)
I have that laptop and I’ve gotten quite a few updates through fwupd.
There’s a lot of “X1 Carbon 6th” listed here.
You might want to post this in the Linux community instead. !linux@lemmy.ml
Thanks
Without usb?
Dual boot into windows and use Lenovo’s utilities.
I don’t have windows
Honestly, given how annoying the alternatives are, I would say just buy a USB drive and put the bios file on there. You can get very good ones for under $20 and almost free ones if you don’t mind having an old tiny one.
This is the real answer. In this day and age where a 16gb USB stick can be had for literally $5usd on Amazon, it would be silly not to have a few kicking around. I don’t think any Linux distro live environment media requires more than 16gb, and it’s more than enough for updating a bios. I even used one to update the infotainment system in my vehicle last week. Kind of a necessary tool.
Even if you need one immediately and can’t wait on Amazon, it’s back to school season. They are plentiful everywhere. Target, Walmart, Kroger, Staples, Office Depot, etc. etc. etc.
Copy bios image to uefi partition and try to open it when in bios, if there is flasher in it.
