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

[L. Rahyen]

On Saturday October 27 2007 05:30, Németh Márton wrote:
> I have a PHILIPS CD-RW/DVD-ROM SCB5265 and I have problems reading of some
> DVDs. I found two different firmware updates which contains .exe files:

	I have problems reading of some DVDs too for a long time so I decided to try 
to update firmware on my ASUS DRW-1608P using Windows update utility on 
Linux. My model is completely different but see below how I did it - it may 
help you too.

> 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?

	After some investigation I can say that WINE has pretty good ASPI 
implementation. And it is possible to update firmware using it but you need 
to run the utility as root and it may take long time (at least in my case and 
I don't think that this is WINE or Linux fault).

> $ wine --version
> wine-0.9.47
> $ wine PHILIPS-SCB5265-TD19.EXE

	As I have said try to run as root instead. Does this work for you?

	In my case when I ran update utility as root (if I try to run it as simple 
user it simply fails with strange error), it took about 10-15 minutes for 
progress bar to appear. Then it took a lot of time to transfer the firmware 
(maybe 30-40 minutes). But at the end update was successful! So this works 
with WINE perfectly at least for me.
	I also have tested VMWare with Windows XP x64. But Windows never worked with 
DMA correctly for me (in fact many years ago my brother have used Windows on 
my computer before he finally switched to Linux and DMA never worked in 
Windows even on real hardware so disk/cd access was terribly slow) and 
without it utility for firmware update doesn't work of course (at least 
according to VMWare warning that DMA should be enabled in the guest). Have no 
idea why Windows don't want to use DMA for DVD drive by default and how this 
can be fixed or how I can enable it (maybe it is possible to install 
additional updates or tweak something in registry, I'm not sure; anyway, this 
isn't an issue for me because my everyday use of VMWare is limited for 
running professional Autodesk products like 3ds max and AutoCAD and that's 
all). I havn't tested 32-bit Windows XP in VMWare.
	Anyway, WINE with Linux (which has perfect support for DMA) works with no 
problem. It is really great to see that it is possible to update firmware in 
my DVD drive using WIndows update utility on Linux with WINE!

	Useful note: you can use hdparm -I /dev/hda (where /dev/hda is the device 
file for your DVD drive) to see what version of firmware you have.