More like retrograde.

I decided to make sure my Gnome audio muting problem wasn’t related to a firmware problem, so I decided to get the latest BIOS update from Dell. Just another example of how an upgrade can cause more problems than it might fix.

Anyway, I upgraded my system BIOS from A07 to A11. I should have known the prospects weren’t good when I discovered that the BIOS upgrade utility requires a 32-bit Windows environment to run. But hey, no problem! I’ll grab a Windows drive out of another laptop, boot from that, and install the upgrade.

That process made sense and worked out great, or so I thought. Then, I rebooted with my Foresight Linux drive, and found an unusable area from right to left and 5/8″ down from the top of the display which was filled black with red symbols where there had previously just been desktop.

Oh yeah, another tiny issue — there was no visible X Windows cursor either. But on closer inspection, the trackpad actually worked. By moving the mouse, I would eventually glide over a desktop item and select it. I never could seem to launch it though. Selecting a menu item also never worked, so I had little option but to simply power down to get out of an unusable environment.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try flashing the back to A08 to see if I can correct this. Googling for this reveals that there are others who have experienced similar issues running Linux on D505’s with this BIOS revision. Seems like A09 has issues too, and I can’t find A07.