(Yes, I know that's GNU/Linux, but my title was already too long :-) ) Translation of my last post in english. Hope it will be readable :-)
Dell publishes all BIOS firmwares as a Windows .EXE. When we try naively to execute it using Wine, Wine stops because the exe tries to flash the firmware using direct access to the hardware... which doesn't work with Wine.
The solution is to use dellBiosUpdate, which ships with the Debian package libsmbios-bin:
aptitude install libsmbios-bin
This tool needs 2 things : the bios firmware in HDR format, and the kernel module dell_rbu to do the update. For this last part, it's easy on a normal Debian (read: with a Debian kernel):
modprobe dell_rbu
For the HDR file, I tried during 2 hours... and indeed it was very easy (please replace the filename by the actual filename):
wine E6400A19.EXE -writehdrfile
Yes, Dell's .EXE knows how to write the HDR file !
Now, you can execute dellBiosUpdate :
dellBiosUpdate -f ./E6400A19.hdr -u
And reboot !
Please note that if you don't use Debian, Dell has some easy setup to update the BIOS firmware under Linux. It seems to work on RPM distributions, and also in Ubuntu. I tried to make it work with Debian, I think I successed but the repository seems to contain rather old firmwares. Maybe I'll try to help them make it work with Debian :-)