GNOME Firmware 3.34.0 Release

This morning I tagged the newest fwupd release, 1.3.1. There are a lot of new things in this release and a whole lot of polishing, so I encourage you to read the release notes if this kind of thing interests you.

Anyway, to the point of this post. With the new fwupd 1.3.1 you can now build just the libfwupd library, which makes it easy to build GNOME Firmware (old name: gnome-firmware-updater) in Flathub. I tagged the first official release 3.34.0 to celebrate the recent GNOME release, and to indicate that it’s ready for use by end users. I guess it’s important to note this is just a random app hacked together by 3 engineers and not something lovelingly designed by the official design team. All UX mistakes are my own :)

GNOME Firmware is designed to be a not-installed-by-default power-user tool to investigate, upgrade, downgrade and re-install firmware.
GNOME Software will continue to be used for updates as before. Vendor helpdesks can ask users to install GNOME Firmware rather than getting them to look at command line output.

We need to polish up GNOME Firmware going forwards, and add the last few features we need. If this interests you, please send email and I’ll explain what needs doing. We also need translations, although that can perhaps wait until GNOME Firmware moves to GNOME proper, rather than just being a repo in my personal GitLab. If anyone does want to translate it before then, please open merge requests, and be sure to file issues if any of the strings are difficult to translate or ambigious. Please also file issues (or even better merge requests!) if it doesn’t build or work for you.

If you just want to try out a new application, it takes 10 seconds to install it from Flathub.

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hughsie

Richard has over 10 years of experience developing open source software. He is the maintainer of GNOME Software, PackageKit, GNOME Packagekit, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Color Manager, colord, and UPower and also contributes to many other projects and opensource standards. Richard has three main areas of interest on the free desktop, color management, package management, and power management. Richard graduated a few years ago from the University of Surrey with a Masters in Electronics Engineering. He now works for Red Hat in the desktop group, and also manages a company selling open source calibration equipment. Richard's outside interests include taking photos and eating good food.

12 thoughts on “GNOME Firmware 3.34.0 Release”

      1. I was a bit lost with the buttons trying to know what they were for. Better to not show them if they aren’t supported in my opinion. Thank’s for your work!

      2. An alternative is to provide a tooltip explaining why the button is disabled. I don’t know which approach is best.

  2. For me it sees only the SSD on with greyed out Verify and Show Releases button. It would really help if it says somewhere “Up-to-date”

    1. It’s allowed to download files from the internet, and can also talk to fwupd over dbus, which can auth with the user to do the update. The fwupd daemon does all heavy lifting.

  4. Like others have commented, I have grayed out buttons and options.

    *”With the new fwupd 1.3.1 you can now build just the libfwupd library, which makes it easy to build GNOME Firmware (old name: gnome-firmware-updater) in Flathub. “*

    As in – you need fwupd 1.3.1 or later to actually utilize GNOME Firmware fully and be able to update your stuff?

    Good job anyhow! :)

    1. No, as in “you need 1.3.1 to easily build the package in Flathub” — older fwupd’s work well too, anything newer than about 0.8 I think.

  6. On my ubuntu bionic it does show the verify button which is not supported, but the show releases button is greyed out as well as install firmware archive in the hamburger menu.
    How do I install the firmware archive to update my unifying receiver?

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