Monday, October 10, 2011

Dell printer firmware update stupidity and howto

Not sure why Dell is taking recent steps backwards with regard to Linux support, but clearly it is. The recent BIOS update issues have given way to printer update utilities that are not Linux install friendly. The most recent example is the otherwise decent Dell 2555dn MFP. The previous A02 version of the firmware (DELL_2355DN-MONO-LASER-MFP_A02_R302331.exe) was just a self-extracting zip file. So a simple
unzip DELL_2355DN-MONO-LASER-MFP_A02_R302331.exe
would provide me with the needed "*.hd" (Dell2355dn_A02_v2.70.03.06.hd in this case) firmware file to load via the update firmware web page.
Now Dell seems to add in their install/extractor utility like the general Windows driver files have... and it takes some extra effort.

My current system/admin setup is based on CentOS 6.x but any recent distro will likely be very close. I'm going to assume that you have already downloaded the file and you are at a command/terminal prompt.

1. Install wine as root
yum install wine cabextract

2. As a normal user get winetricks and install "vcrun6"
wget http://winetricks.org/winetricks chmod +x winetricks ./winetricks vcrun6


3. As a normal user run the installer like and just exit after the GUI comes up
wine Dell2355dn_A03_2.70.03.08.exe

4. After you should be able to find the needed *.hd file in "~/.wine/drive_c/users/YOUR_USERNAME/Temp/". For this example, it was "~/.wine/drive_c/users/pj/Temp/Dell2355dn_A03_2.70.03.08.hd"

Possible error messages:
If you don't have the VBRUN 6 installed (vcrun6) you will get an error like:
err:module:import_dll Library MFC42.DLL (which is needed by L BLAHBLAH) not found
err:module:LdrInitializeThunk Main exe initialization for L BLAHBLAH failed, status c0000135

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