For fwupdmgr you can or need to get, configure, enable or disable a remote, but what exactly is a remote?

The generic meaning of "a remote" is a remote control device, like the controller for a television. Since fwupdmgr is a tool for updating the firmware on devices, you may be encountering generic warnings not to have an active remote control device interacting with the target device while you are flashing the firmware of the target device. But that's just me using my imagination. That worked for Einstein, but I'm not him. A little more context might shed additional light on the situation, such as a link to the online documentation that speaks so cryptically about remotes or a copy/paste excerpt from your offline documentation that does the same.

there is a link in the original post, but that man page is more or less useless. This looks a bit better: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd. And this is the home page (if I understand well): https://fwupd.org/lvfs/docs/users

It is the man page linked in my original post that speaks so cryptically about remotes.

Sorry, I missed the link to the man page, which I had originally found anyway, and marveled at its paucity of information. Actual documentation for this toolset seems to be in short supply. The man page does almost tell us something inadvertantly, though. One of its many references to remote says this:

Here it say remote server. Ah, a remote server. And the command line arguments to fwupdmgr that this text annotates contains a REMOTE-ID argument. Looking at the other occurrences of remote in this cursory documentation of fwupdmgr command line arguments, we see the REMOTE-ID show up a few times.

Clues, but not great ones. Refreshing metadata from a remote server probably pulls metadata (a vague term in itself) from the LVFS firmware repository that serves as the backend of the fwupd toolset. Does that mean every reference to remote in the man page is actually a generalized reference to the LVFS repository? Perhaps. But surely the modify-remote argument does not reach out across the Internet and modify data on the LVFS firmware repository. Perhaps, instead, it allows you to fine tune your locally held data that you have already pulled from the LVFS repository.

When I first came across your post, I googled fwupdmgr, found the git repository, which pointed toward the LVFS web site. Pretty web site. Not much actual info. More google searching is probably required. Surely others have struggled to use this toolset and written of the experience.

There is a README file in the git repository: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/blob/main/README.md There's also something identified as a tutorial: https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd/blob/...cs/tutorial.md

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