[Wine] is wine's ASPI suitable for firmware update?

[L. Rahyen]

On Saturday October 27 2007 15:33, Németh Márton wrote:
> L. Rahyen wrote:
> > On Saturday October 27 2007 05:30, Németh Márton wrote:
> >> My question is that how complete is the ASPI implementation in wine?
> >> May the firmware update work under wine, or we are far from this state?
> >
> > 	Direct hardware access doesn't work on WINE. For example, you cannot
> > record CD or DVD using Windows software under WINE. However, you can
> > record CD or DVD using VMWare (it has free trial for 30 days - more than
> > enough to update firmware). VirtualBox or QEmu (both are free) maybe will
> > work too but I never tested them for that purpose. Actually, I never used
> > VMWare for updating firmware in SCSI/IDE/SATA device but I think this
> > should work too - probably as good as CD/DVD writing. Anyway, there is no
> > harm to try this. You can download VMWare at http://vmware.com .
> > 	Use of sophisticated virtual machines is the only way in your case.
> > Another alternative is to use DOS executables for update (many vendors
> > have them as an alternative) with FreeDOS but this will require reboot;
> > and this is only way if you havn't a copy of Windows CD/DVD (it is needed
> > for virtual machine).
>
> Thank you for your response. I am afraid that FreeDOS is not suitable in
> this case as the firmware updater .exe requires Win32 API. I was thinking
> about ReactOS ( http://www.reactos.org/ ), but I haven't tried it, yet.
>
> Using VMWare, VirtualBox or QEmu could be a solution, thanks for the idea.

	I have tested ReactOS in VMWare and it was worked fine. Please note that it 
supports much less Windows programs than WINE and is very unstable. I have no 
idea if firmware updater will work with it but if you havn't Windows 
installation CD/DVD at hand then you can try ReactOS instead: it should work 
in most virtual machines.