{"id":1304,"date":"2017-07-04T16:01:19","date_gmt":"2017-07-04T14:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/?p=1304"},"modified":"2017-07-04T16:01:59","modified_gmt":"2017-07-04T14:01:59","slug":"upgrading-the-firmware-on-a-dell-xps-13-tb16-and-d3100-docking-stations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/2017\/07\/04\/upgrading-the-firmware-on-a-dell-xps-13-tb16-and-d3100-docking-stations\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading the firmware on a Dell XPS 13, TB16 and D3100 docking stations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Dell XPS 13 (talking about the 9360, Kaby Lake version) is a nice laptop, it can be ordered from Dell with Linux on it. Linux (I use Kubuntu 17.04) works out of the box, with every bit and piece supported. I only replaced the wifi module with the Intel 7265, it shows a better stability with the corporate wifi services I have to work with.<\/p>\n<p>The laptop came with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed. I erased the SSD, installed Kubuntu, and was happy with it. I recovered the Windows 10 Pro license to use under Virtualbox. I used this command to recover the license:<\/p>\n<pre>sudo cat \/sys\/firmware\/acpi\/tables\/MSDM<\/pre>\n<p>Then I bought 2 docking stations: the Dell D3100 and the Dell TB16. Those docking weren&#8217;t working stable enough for my taste, I had some annoying issues, e.g. with hot-plugging the laptop. So I thought &#8220;let&#8217;s upgrade all these firmwares&#8221;. Turns out, modern hardware has <em>a lot<\/em> of firmware running, they are all over place. Upgrading them from Linux is not an option for now.<\/p>\n<p>So I needed a Windows 10 running. This is how I proceeded:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>ensure my Windows 10 VM isn&#8217;t running<\/li>\n<li>convert its disk to an image:<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre>VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw Windows-10.vdi ~\/tmp\/win10.img<\/pre>\n<ul>\n<li>copy the image to an USB disk (you should know how to select \/dev\/<strong>sdX<\/strong> below):<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<pre>dd if=~\/tmp\/win10.img of=\/dev\/sdX bs=4M<\/pre>\n<p>The resulting disk booted my XPS 13 easily (had to go to the boot menu with &lt;F12&gt; and select legacy USB boot). I let it boot, it took some time to adjust to the new hardware (it as running on a Virtualbox PC before). Then, I followed this procedure:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>remove \/ de-install the Virtualbox VM guest additions.<\/li>\n<li>install the Dell Update tool (get it from dell.com\/support).<\/li>\n<li>and then wait a long while until it found out the whole bunch of stuff to upgrade : BIOS, chips, drivers, power-manager, kitchen-sink, etc. It took about one hour, with a few reboot in between.<\/li>\n<li>I then plugged-in every docking station, one after the other, watching Dell Update installing the drivers. I rebooted once with each docking, as it looks like the docking firmware is upgraded at driver start. I&#8217;m not sure about it, I think I read it on a forum, Dell doesn&#8217;t provide any release notes.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m now keeping this disk handy, for future upgrades. Smarter than dual-boot and eating 30-50 Gb of my precious SSD space. And finally, does it work better ? I <em>think<\/em> so. After 2 days, I have less issues. It looks like the Realtek ethernet chips in the docking stations are still causing problems, but it&#8217;s probably related to the Realtek driver, not the docking themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Dell XPS 13 (talking about the 9360, Kaby Lake version) is a nice laptop, it can be ordered from Dell with Linux on it. Linux (I use Kubuntu 17.04) works out of the box, with every bit and piece supported. I only replaced the wifi module with the Intel 7265, it shows a better [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-linux","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1304"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1312,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1304\/revisions\/1312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.netnea.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}