Upgrading the BIOS on a T30

So, I finally got Deb to give me her old T30 to play with [Thanks, Love], and the first thing I did was to wipe Windows XP off of it, and replace it with Ubuntu.

I have to say, as desktop OSes go, Ubuntu is pretty nice. I honestly don’t know why the average user would need anything else — web, mail, IM, office suite, you name it. And it performs well on the T30, unlike XP. I could even turn on XGL and get the amazing wobbly windows! 🙂

Of course, with any linux install the issue is whether or not it will find/configure all of your hardware properly. In this case, because of the ubiquitousness of ThinkPads I would guess, the support for Ubuntu on them has been well tuned, and I had no problems getting everything installed… or so I thought.

It turns out there were two issues, one a minor annoyance, and one quite serious:

1. If you put it to sleep, when it wakes up the sound is disabled
2. As far as I can tell, attempting to connect to a wireless network, “hangs” the machine. That is, if I try to connect to my home network, it silently does nothing, and leaves me in a state where I can no longer start any gui processes.

According to Google, the solution to the former problem is to upgrade your BIOS, and given that the BIOS on this machine is still the original 1.0 version, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that upgrading would fix the wireless problem too.

The link to download the bios (and many other T30 updates) is here:

Lenovo Support & downloads – Drivers and software – ThinkPad T30

According to that page, I actually need to upgrade two different things: the BIOS and the “Embedded Controller Program”. This is where things start to get scary. Apparently, if you need to update both, then you have to update the BIOS first, but if you read the description of the BIOS, it claims that it won’t run without the updated ECP. Um…

What I hope is true, is that you can update the BIOS and it will still run well enough to let you update the ECP, even though it’s running on the wrong version. Of course, it seems like the best way to do that would be to use the minimal set of hardware/software capabilities to do the updates [can you imagine attempting this from within Ubuntu?], so time to build some boot floppies.

Erk! No floppy drive.

So now what do I do? Has anyone gone through this process? Anybody in Ottawa with a spare TP floppy drive? Anybody want to hold my hand while I do the lobotomy?