Flashrom Utility for LINUX (part1)

This blog entry is a little bit OffTopic. I’m writing not about an openSUSE Theme, but about
Linux. Last week i’ve chatted with the guys in #coreboot @ freenode and it was very
interesting. This article based on an collaborative PR Project from Carl-Daniel Hailfinger. This first Part of the Article presents Flashrom. The next Article presents Coreboot. The web site of that project is:

http://www.coreboot.org/

The flash utility is known as „Flashrom“.

Flashrom is a universal flash programming utility used to detect, read, erase, or write BIOS
chips (parallel, LPC, FWH and SPI technologies) in various packages (DIP, PLCC, SOIC).
It can be used to flash firmware images such as traditional BIOS or coreboot or to back up
the existing firmware.

Everybody who does not want to boot DOS or Windows just to perform a BIOS update can use
flashrom. It does not require a graphics card, monitor or keyboard and can even be used
over SSH on a remote machine. You do not have to reboot to run flashrom, but it is recommended
to reboot after a successful update. Many people are using flashrom as a replacement for
the various AMI/Award/Phoenix BIOS flashing tools out there.

Flashrom supports over 100 flash chips and it is really easy to add support for a new chip
if your board happens to have an unsupported chip.

Flashrom has its own home page: http://www.coreboot.org/Flashrom

It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.

Flashrom is a „normal“ user space application, but it requires superuser privileges.
Some hardened kernels (which deny access to physical memory) do not support flashrom, but
most distributions out there work fine.

Of course, the usual requirements for BIOS updates apply here as well. You should have a
stable power supply. Switching the machine off during flashing will make your machine
unbootable. Since flashrom treats BIOS files as opaque blobs, you usually do not get any
of the failover/dual BIOS features advertised on some boards.

Backup the current BIOS image into a file:

$ flashrom -r backup.bin

For other usage instructions, please refer to the flashrom home page or the man page.

In case something goes wrong, do NOT reboot, but join #coreboot @freenode and tell the
flashrom developers about it. As long as the machine is still running, there is a good
chance that everything can be fixed.

Howto – Adobe Flashplayer for X86_64

Unfortunaltely no Flashplayer for x86_64 exists. So far. Now the Adobe Labs released the libflashplayer for x86_64. It is very easy to run it on openSUSE.

First of all, you must download it.  Go to http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html.

Then go to the bottom of the page, and klick on „Download 64-Bit Plugin for Linux“. Now you will see an Dialogbox. At this place you can download the tar.gz File to an Place, you wish.

After them, you go to your shell, and go into the Directory, that you have specified in the Dialogbox. Now you type: „tar xvfz libflashplayer-{insert your Version].tar.gz“. After unpacking you will see an file called „libflashplayer.so“.

Now you have two alternatives:

1.)  If you are the only one on your Computer, you can move the file to: ~/.mozilla/plugins.

2.) If you have more Persons at the computer, you move the file to: /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/

After an Restart from Firefox you can use this new plugin.

From the Developers Side the Plugin is in unstable Status. But it works for me very fine. If you would like, try it out. …