2018-08-03, 13:16 PM

So I've been super excited about the LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) project for a long time now. Up until recently Dell was the only major OEM to extensively support it with a wide range of projects. They've also made a lot of contributions to the project. We've known Lenovo has been showing interest and conducted testing in the past but just now I played around with the fwupdmgr and noticed that my X1C5 is now listed as supported and the 1.34 BIOS is available through it!

The official LVFS Vendor Status page now also shows Lenovo has having uploaded firmware and that several devices are supported. This is awesome news and totally cool to see not just the latest X1C being supported but the 5th gen as well.

If you're on Linux, try running

fwupdmgr get-devices

and

fwupdmgr get-updates

to see if there's anything available for your laptop. If you're running Gnome you should also see updates directly in the Software Center as it integrates with fwupdmgr.

This is an awesome service and saves you the need to boot up into a Windows environment or flash USB sticks to install firmware updates. It also saves you the hassle of constantly having to check the Lenovo support site for new firmware updates. Granted, it seems only BIOS updates are shipped for now, but hopefully it's a sign of things to come.

I installed the BIOS update and the experience was extremely smooth and painless. It even showed a nice installation graphic I havent seen before.

Great job, Lenovo! You dont always show much love for your Linux userbase these days but this is great news! Lenovo is the only other major computer OEM that uses LVFS (Dell being the other one) so this is big. If anyone from the Thinkpad Linux team (if there is such a team) is reading. Thank you!