V90 Modem Firmware Update

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You've probably heared about the modem firmware update that is distributed by Sony to fix some problems with interrrupted connections. Now unfortunately this update is distributed as a Windows executable. However, I've managed to update my modem using just Linux software (and a Caldera DR-DOS boot disk). Here's what I have done:

Get the Update File

The firmware update file is distributed from the Sony Web site. Download the file and save it somewhere on your Linux partition.

Here is the link to the general Software Update Page at Sony: http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/pc/softupdates_2.html

The 505FX Updates are at: http://www.ita.sel.sony.com/support/pc/softupdates_505f505fx.html

Extract the Update Floppy

The distributed file contains programs and data files that need to be written to a bootable DOS floppy disk. The difficult part is to exctract these files. You can either go to a machine that has Windows loaded and do it there, but I did not have access to one at home, and we hard core Linux users usually don't have friends with Windows machines either :-)

I used the latest version of Wine to extract the data from the distribution file. This worked out pretty well. Once you have the files in a directory just create a bootable DOS disk and copy the files to this new disk. To generate the bootable DISK I used dosemu running Caldera DR-DOS.

Updating the Modem Firmware

Once you have the bootable disk containing the update software you just boot the Sony notebook with this disk and follow the steps in the readme file.

Done.

No need to use any software that wasn't on my Linux machine to extract and intstall the modem firmware upgrade. Cool.