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 impossible to upgrade the firmware on Linux, now the situation gets a lot better thanks to the great Linux Vendor Firmware Service - LVFS project, which allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates, freeing the users to use Windows just to upgrade their firmware. We mainly use Lenovo machines and guess what, they are fully supported.

Pre-requisites

To succeed with the upgrades, we need to check 2 things on the BIOS/UEFI configurations:

1. Ensure to have the Secure boot disabled.
2. Ensure to have the Boot lock disabled (under Startup bios section)
3. [OPTIONAL] *: Ensure to have Linux-Firmware-Updater ad the first item on the Boot priority order on the UEFI conf.

Graphical front-ends

GNOME Software will check for updates periodically and automatically download firmware in the background on GNOME. After the 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

Dual Boot Troubleshooting

In the event that you receive a new laptop with a dual boot of Windows/Ubuntu, and you are not prompted to boot into Ubuntu, or for some reasons the grub bootloader gets overwritten by the Windows counterpart, first boot into Windows, open a command prompt as an Administrator and execute the following command:

bcdedit /set "{bootmgr}" path \EFI\ubuntu\grubx64.efi

After restarting the Grub bootloader should now prompt you to select Ubuntu.