There are two ways of downloading firmware in Windows: by HyperTerminal using 1K-XMODEM protocol and by DwlWin using proprietary protocol.
First technicque in theory might be ported to Linux with Minicom instead of HyperTerminal:
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=2133&p=8840&hilit=linux#p7878
But the method suggested doesn’t work reliably, the most luck is to download dwl.dwl, but further attempt to download firmware image fails and makes the module or modem unusable until you reflash it with DwlWin. That is the question - can DwlWin be used on Linux OS? It do starts with Wine, but can not recognize attached module and thus can’t flash it. Maybe somebody has a working Wine configuration able to start DwlWin under?
Or is there any other tool that one can use under Linux?
I’m suprised that downloading firmware corrupts your firmware. The worst problems I’ve ever seen is that the download fails and the old firmware is still running. What Linux distribution are you using (or what versions of minicom and sx)?
My experiences:
Never ever use 1k-XMODEM. Always plain XMODEM. Almost every time I used 1K mode it failed. I had a client who tried this once and also got corrupt firmware.
My thoughts:
Hyperterminal is the most unstable application ever written. It is more likely to corrupt transfers than minicom+sx. Hyperterminal works wonderfully most of the time, but in almost all embedded applications it completely hangs when you try to use hardware flow control.
Unfortunately I could not yet find a good replacement. By good I mean something that can send Ctrl+Z, clean interface, working.
I am using Kubuntu 7.04 with Minicom 2.2-4build1 and sx 0.12.21rc.
I have had no problems at all using 1K-XMODEM with Hypoterminal or other terminal emulators provided you use hardware flow control.
There are many things wrong with hypoterminal, but this isn’t one of them.
Its 1K-XMODEM works fine - I guess you have a flow-control problem?
I have never had that particular problem with it…
The whole point of XMODEM is that the application used to implement it is entirely irrelevant: you can use anything that implements XMODEM - it has nothing specifically to do with Hypoterminal!
Hardware flow control is turned on, but still there is no result.