Makes checking and updating your computer's firmware easier

Aug 19, 2019 11:38 GMT  ·  By

American computer manufacturer System76 announced a new, cross-platform graphical utility that promises to make checking and updating your computer's firmware a lot easier.

The Firmware Manager project is System76's latest toy for the company's in-house built, Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution, but also compatible with any Debian-based GNU/Linux distro out there. Backed by the fwupd and system76-firmware CLI tools, the Firmware Manager utility will integrate into the GNOME Settings panel for easier firmware updating.

"One of the issues we faced with firmware management on Linux was the lack of options for graphical frontends to firmware management services like fwupd and system76-firmware," said System76. "For fwupd, the only solutions available were to distribute either GNOME Software or KDE Discover, which is not viable for Linux distributions which have their own application centers, or frontends to package managers."

System76's Firmware Manager is coming soon to a distro near you

While a GUI frontend was available for System76's system76-firmware command-line utility, it only supported updating firmware for System76 computers. This is were the Firmware Manager GTK application comes into play, as it supports checking and updating firmware from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), as well as system76-firmware.

On top of that, Firmware Manager is compatible with Wayland and it's available as both a standalone GTK app and library for integration into a new Firmware panel in the Devices category section of the GNOME Settings app, as well as for developers who want to create their own graphical frontend for other desktop environments than GNOME.

Firmware Manager will soon be available for installation from the software repositories of your favorite Debian or Ubuntu-based operating system, but being a free and open-source software you can also download and compile the source code right now from the project's GitHub page. System76 says that all existing Pop!_OS Linux users will receive the Firmware Manager utility automatically.

Firmware Manager integrated into GNOME Settings
Firmware Manager integrated into GNOME Settings

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Firmware Manager standalone GTK app
Firmware Manager integrated into GNOME Settings
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