Paul Legato

Dell only provides certain PowerEdge BIOS flash upgrades in the form of Windows-only self-extracting archives (despite the facts that they claim to officially support Linux and that the BIOS flash utility itself is a DOS program.) Ordinary unzip won’t open the self-extracting archive. You need to run it on a Windows system, which I don’t have. Here’s how to flash your PowerEdge BIOS without Windows.

Dell provides the biosdisk utility to make a bootable FreeDOS image with the BIOS upgrade executable on it, but it doesn’t work with the Windows-only PowerEdge 4400 BIOS upgrade, since that won’t run on FreeDOS. They claim that biosdisk isn’t intended for PowerEdge systems, since they all have Linux BIOS flashes available; this does not seem to actually be the case for the 4400.

The Windows self-extractor does run under WINE, but it demands an actual floppy drive device to write to, which my computer doesn’t have. WINE also doesn’t seem to support mounting an image file as a floppy device, for some reason. You’ll need to use something like VMWare or a computer with a physical floppy drive to get this to extract itself.

Once you have a floppy image, here’s how to flash without biosdisk or Windows available: Continue Reading »

Popularity: 22% [?]

Flashing the BIOS without a floppy drive can be done with an Ultimate Boot CD (free!) and a USB memory stick. BIOS upgrades usually come in the form of an MS-DOS executable meant to be run from a bootable floppy, but modern computers don’t usually have floppy drives anymore, and who has a copy of DOS lying around anyway?

1. Download a copy of the free Ultimate Boot CD and burn it to disk. FreeDOS (and a lot of other useful stuff) is preinstalled on the CD. As the name implies, FreeDOS is a free, open source, binary-compatible replacement for MS-DOS.
2. Download the replacement BIOS from your motherboard’s manufacturer. Unpack it onto a USB flash drive.
3. Plug your flash drive into the target computer and boot it with your Ultimate Boot CD. Select FreeDOS from the menu.
4. FreeDOS asks a number of configuration questions while booting. You can usually leave all at their default except for the ASPIUSB driver. ASPIUSB is not enabled by default (at the time of this writing), but is necessary for the use of a USB flash drive under DOS, so enable it when prompted.
5. If you miss the prompt for the USB driver, don’t worry. Type “menu” at a command prompt and enable USB devices from the popup menu.
6. Change to your flash drive by typing e.g. R: and execute the BIOS flash utility as per the manufacturer’s instructions. (If you don’t know which drive letter to use, type “menu” and select the option to display active drive letters.)

Popularity: 17% [?]

Libcurl’s Java bindings now compile on Macintosh, with a few minor modifications to the Makefile. Get the code from my Github account.

Update: More recent Java bindings, which do not seem to be linked anywhere on the libcurl site, are available at http://www.gknw.net/viewvc/trunk/?root=curl-java. Still no multi support, though.

Popularity: 5% [?]

So I wanted to write a cron job on my Mac. Just run this script every day at midnight. Nothing fancy.

In standard Unix, this is one line in a crontab:

0 0 * * * /some/script

That’s it. Put that in your crontab and /some/script will run every day at midnight.

Naturally, I typed man crontab on my Mac to get started. Apple likes to make weird minor modifications to standard Unix commands sometimes. I found:

(Darwin note: Although cron(8) and crontab(5) are officially supported under Darwin, their functionality has been absorbed into launchd(8), which provides a more flexible way of automatically executing commands. See launchctl(1) for more information.)

More flexible, huh? I’m all about more flexible! Sounds good. Another well thought out Apple improvement, sweeping away 30+ years of Unix cruft at a stroke!

Not quite. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 19% [?]