[PS. I coudn't resist. I just had to name the package '*Kit'. ]

Need to do a firmware update with a DOS program?

Can get tricky if you don’t have a DOS system around. We used to provide a bootable floppy image for that in the past (package dosbootdisk). But who has a floppy drive anyway?

So, here comes the new
FirmwareUpdateKit package. Install it and run run, e.g. fuk --grub foobar.exe That’s it. The next reboot gives you the option to start DOS and run foobar.exe.

fuk can also create bootable ISOs and, of course, even floppy images.

Quite often I get bugreports that the hardware detection doesn’t find the monitor. Well, what should I do? We run a Video BIOS function for it, and if the BIOS can’t see the monitor, we’re out of luck.

But maybe not? It can well be that running BIOS code in Linux is not the best idea either.

To shed some light I wrote a small (6.5k if you must know) DOS-program and put it on a bootable CD. If that can’t detect the monitor it’s probably the BIOS’s fault, if it works blame, well, someone else.

On a side note, the program was created with the usual gcc. It’s really surprising what you can do with a nice include file and a linker script.