[announce] firmware-tools: easier bios updates in Linux

We are happy to announce the public availability of a new method of
doing BIOS updates for RPM-based Linux systems called firmware-tools. 

The full announcement along with starting instructions are here:
http://linux.dell.com/firmware-tools/announce.html. Please carefully
read the disclaimers and instructions.

In essence, what we are releasing are tools to take existing Dell Update
Packages, and other BIOS types and create RPMs out of them. These RPMs
can be put into a yum repository. And then we provide tools to help
download and install the correct BIOS RPM for your particular system. If
you do not care to make your own repository, we have also released an
unofficial, non-Dell supported repository with pre-packaged BIOS updates
at http://www.fwupdate.com. (Important: Not Dell supported. The only
support is via the firmware-tools-devel mailing list.)

All of these tools are available in the unofficial Dell yum repository
at http://linux.dell.com/repo/software/. Source is provided in the
relevant SRPMs.

Future directions:
Currently, we have released only system BIOS updates. We will be
releasing other update types, for example RAID firmware, in the future,
when they are ready.
We hope to eventually get help from non-RPM distributions in porting
these tools to other distributions such as Debian and Gentoo.

--
Michael Brown


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