The idea of QtBiosUpdate was born when I wanted to make an interface for dellbiosupdate.sh.
First I thought about kdialog, then drf_ offered his help to make a real GUI for it in Qt and 10 minutes of (for his skills) code. But then, we have chatted a little bit more about it and found out that “libsmbios” had some calls and all the stuff a programmer (which I’m not) could want to make a real Qt application. Beside that I also learnt that SMBIOS is a standard for x86 BIOSes, that made my fervent imagination fly: a single application in Qt to update the BIOSes of several vendors for Linux!!!
An Enthusiastic Start:
As soon as I realized that QtBiosUpdate could really be something I literally spammed quite a few mailing lists. I was searching for help and contributions (in any form) and for direct support from both KDE and Dell. I was asking Dell’s communities since “libsmbios” is a FLOSS library included in Linux developed by Dell, since they could have provided the hardware to test on or the software infrastructure to host the project among their many FLOSS projects. But it was just a dream.
The Sad Reality:
The idea (and especially the requests) didn’t really catch up, apart from Aaron Seigo saying it was a cool project to have. So I set up to learn C++ and Qt to start this all by myself. Then I realized that I should also have started learning lower level development skills and all the needed knowledge to work at such low level.
Unfortunately I realized that this was a bit too much for me to have “an itch to scratch” in order to learn coding, not to mention C++ and Qt. That is why I abandoned the idea for now.
Hope:
Maybe one day I’ll make QtBiosUpdate reality. Perhaps a Qt GUI for Flashrom which it supports not only BIOSes but also EFI, Coreboot, OpenBIOS and pretty much anything that fits in a flash.
