As a followup to my previous blog about a Firmware Updates LiveCD HOWTO, I've now
made an OMSA LiveCD HOWTO, based on CentOS 5. Others, such as Harald Jensas, have done this in the past. The Fedora livecd-tools make it even easier.
With these instructions, you can generate a LiveCD image that runs
OMSA 5.2, and you can turn that LiveCD into a bootable USB key too.
There isn't enough space on a CD to include all the system_bios* and
pci_firmware* packages (the iso winds up being over 700MB), but if you want
to burn it to a DVD or have a 1GB USB key, feel free to add those
packages to the package list, or simply install them into the live
environment at runtime:
$ sudo -s
# yum install $(inventory_firmware -b)
# update_firmware
As we've noted in the past, OMSA 5.x uses only GPL'd drivers which are maintained in kernel.org and in the distribution kernels.