Lewis G Rosenthal wrote:

Most of the time, I just sigh and reboot to Wintendo to do firmware flashing of different things, as most manufacturers provide a little Win app to handle that. I'm interested to hear of any brave soul's (or souls') experience(s) with flashing under OS/2, either using TFTP or some other method.

[...]

I second that! There must be a large bunch of monkeys out there, escaped from some strange kind of labor, making distribution packages for all IT companies in the dumbest way possible.

My flash experience with the IBM wireless miniPCI card reads as follows:

+ Downloaded a Win-only package

+ Started/extracted it using ODIN and did let it expand it's content and then waiting afterward.

+ Looked into the %TEMP% directory structure I recognized that there is a floppy disk image sitting around.

+ Expanded this image to a floppy disk using DSK4PM.

+ Closed the Win-only program.

+ Booted with the floppy in the USB floppy drive.

+ Saw the program flashing the card (I think so, as I haven't checked the versions afterward).


The blown up Win distribution does nothing else then to extract some files from this disk image, and then reboot the computer into DOS mode to flash the card. Who the hell does believe that it isn't necessary to publish the disk image stand alone.


And another good example to prove my monkey theory are the various driver packages for OS/2 (or multi platform) in an Win only self extracting archive (not possible to run unzip against).

Sorry for this off topic rant, but you did press the button...

Michael