GNOME Firmware Updater

A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “ power user ” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line. GNOME and KDE software centers deliberately show a “simple” view of firmware, only showing devices when updates are pending.

In June I was introduced to Andrew Schwenn, who was our intern for the summer. This blog isn’t about Andrew, but I will say he did amazingly well and was soon up to speed filing excellent pull requests even with a grumpy anally-retentive maintainer like me. Andrew has finished his internship now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we work again with him in the future. Most of the work so far is from Andrew, so I can’t claim too much credit here.

GNOME Firmware Updater was designed in the style of a GNOME Control Center panel, and all the code is written in a way to make a port very simple indeed if that’s what we actually want. At the moment it’s a seporate project and binary, as we’re still prototyping the UI and working out what kind of UX we want from a power user tool. It’s mostly complete and a few weeks away from it’s first release. When it does get an official release, I’ll be sure to upload it to Flathub to make it easy for the world to install. If this sounds interesting to you the code ishere. I don’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to this power user tool, but please open pull requests or issues if there’s something you’d like to see fixed.