Ubuntu Administration
This guide contains examples and tips&tricks to solve common and advanced tasks on Linux and more specifically on our provisioned Ubuntu stack.
Firmware updates
This piece assumes you are running Ubuntu >= 20.04
Once upon a time, it was quite impossibile to upgrade firmwares on Linux, now the situation gets a lot better thanks to the great (Linux Vendor Firmware Service - LVFS)[https://fwupd.org/] project, which allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates, freeing the users to use Windows just to upgrade their firmwares. We mainly use Lenovo machines and guess what, they are fully supported.
Pre-requisites
In order to succeed with the upgrades, we need to check 2 things on the BIOS/UEFI configurations:
- Ensure to have the
Secure boot
disabled. - Ensure to have the
Boot lock
disabled (underStartup
bios section) - [OPTIONAL] *: Ensure to have
Linux-Firmware-Updater
ad the first item on theBoot priority order
on the UEFI conf.
Graphical front-ends
GNOME Software will check for updates periodically and automatically download firmwares in the background on GNOME. After a firmware has been downloaded a popup will be displayed in Gnome Software to perform the update.
Usage
To display all devices detected by fwupd:
$ fwupdmgr get-devices
Note: Listed devices may not be updatable through fwupd (e.g. Intel integrated graphics). Alternative vendor solutions may be provided instead.
To download the latest metadata from the Linux Vendor firmware Service (LVFS):
$ fwupdmgr refresh
To list updates available for any devices on the system:
$ fwupdmgr get-updates
To install updates:
$ fwupdmgr update
For more detailed info check this guide: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Fwupd