I have been racking my brain about this for a while now and now I just need some help because I can’t figure it out.

So I login to my dell account, punch in my service tag number and it brings up info regarding my specific laptop. There are TONS of firmware and drivers that I believe may be missing? But the issue is, all the files are .exe and thats clearly for windows. They have no fedora or rpm supported drivers or firmware that I could find.

Its crucial because I just got a dell wd19tbs docking station and as per the install instructions, there’s a set of firmware/drivers that must be installed prior to setting up the dock

I have lvfs repo enabled, I tried the whole fwupdmgr technique a million times though it never does shit. No firmware or drivers show up in yhe gnome store… So why is this so complicated? How do I install dell drivers and firmware on a fedora system?

  • Macaroni9538OP
    1·
    1 year ago

    So yea I just hooked up the dock and in gnome firmware it appears that the proper drivers for the dock are installed, but theres like no gui or anything to configure the thing? is it supposed to be that way? how do people make any changes or configurations to their docks? I see no way on my system to do so

    • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Out of curiosity, what options were you looking to configure? Since I’m not familiar with these docking stations, I wasn’t even aware they had configuration options haha.

      • Macaroni9538OP
        2·
        1 year ago

        I have no idea lol I just figured there would be some sort of app or gui for it so you can tweak settings or what not. not gonna lie but the dell documentation for this dock is terrible. for instance, if it’s always plugged into your laptop, the battery will always be at 100%; isn’t that terrible for your battery?

        • russjr08@outpost.zeuslink.netEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          As far as I had last heard, most laptop (and phones) batteries have charging circuits that are designed to let the battery discharge a bit to prevent the health from being degraded quickly - not all of them actively report that process though and tells the OS it’s at 100%, so that the user doesn’t wonder why their charge is dropping while it’s plugged in.

          I’m not sure if that is all the same case, as the only laptop that I’ve had for a while is a really old MacBook Pro that runs Fedora, but I don’t use it super often because I prefer my desktop - so I don’t keep up with a lot of laptop-oriented stuff unfortunately.

          • Macaroni9538OP
            2·
            1 year ago

            I changed the charging option in bios to “primarily use AC” or something along those lines, so hoping that helps prevent possible problems