Dell Poweredge, Latitude and Optiplex BIOS updates HOWTO for Fedora, CentOS and RHEL

BIOS updates for us Linux types have not been very easy. It was often difficult enough when there was boot floppies to deal with. Now it seems that many vendors even require actual Windows to be running in order to update. Luckily, Dell has not been one of those companies when it comes to their business lines of servers, laptops and desktops.

The whole process is very easy thanks to Dell's commitment to Linux:

1.  wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/bootstrap.cgi | bash
2.  wget -q -O - http://linux.dell.com/repo/firmware/bootstrap.cgi | bash
3.  yum -y install libsmbios-bin firmware-tools firmware-addon-dell
4.  yum -y install $(bootstrap_firmware)
5.  update_firmware --yes

Make sure "plugins=1" is in your /etc/yum.conf
Don't take my word for it look at Dell's firmware repository information.

I have had success using these steps for Poweredge 2850, 2950, R710, Optiplex GX280, GX520, GX620, Latitude D620 and D630 just to name a few. In addition, OS's have been CentOS 5.x, Fedora 11, 12 and 13.