Final Post on Star Wars: The Old Republic (Probably)

I just checked the Winehq Appdb entry and it looks like people have been able to get it to work on vanilla wine.  Check out here and here.  I used Play on Linux all this time so I was stuck with 1.5.0 forever.  Hope it helps whoever wants to run the game on Linux.

Random thoughts...

Dug up a bit of the fglrx woes with my laptop and I figured that this was caused partially by bad code on AMD's part (what else is new?) and the regressions on the intel driver.  Truth be told, I don't know whether my laptop uses the hybrid method of Intel HD and Radeon 7670m but that seems to be the case judging by the Xorg logs.

I saw on the logs "screen 1 deleted because of no matching config section" and seemed to ramble on about some intel stuff that I was not aware of.  This launchpad bug seemed to corroborate with the evidence thus far.  From what I gather, fglrx is 12.9 which doesn't seem to support the Xorg version that my Ubuntu install came with.  

At the end of it, it really comes down to simply being happy with the open source radeon drivers.  I know never to trust AMD cards on Linux.  This just proves me right once more.

Moving on, a few days ago I quit Star Wars: The Old Republic.  The grindy gameplay and the overly negative community accelerated my exit.  Part of me felt like I wasted the months of play away.  Part of me felt sad to leave the splendid story unfinished.  When I moved to Walking Dead however, all that evaporated.  Walking Dead was a refreshing change to that game and provided me with what I thought was a great representation of modern point and click adventures.  Telltale has finally redeemed themselves after the utterly boring Monkey Island games and the insulting Back to the Future game.  Good job, guys!

Setting up my new laptop...

I bought the HP Pavilion G4-2123TX and so far, it's been great.  Most of the hardware seem to work out of the box.  The only sticking point thus far has been AMD which continues to be an absolute failure of a company in the Linux world.  I half-expected AMD graphics drivers to suck on Linux, but had hoped that Valve's Linux push would mean decent fglrx releases.  I was wrong.  So wrong.

When I installed my Ubuntu 12.10 on my desktop running nVIDIA hardware, the process was relatively painless.  There's a few hoops for sure, but everything worked fine afterwards.  Well, AMD is a truly a POS when it comes to Linux support.  I've tried to install the kernel headers, and configured their fglrx drivers repeatedly and it only produced issues.  Way to go Ubuntu and AMD.  It's apparently a known issue, and one that hasn't been solved until now.  Seriously.

Keyboard going haywire after remote desktop...

For the past few months, I have, on occasion, experienced my keyboard being non-responsive after disconnecting from a remote desktop session from my Android tablet.  It seems to be intermittent and is usually detectable by the numlock light flashing intensely.  Now, I have narrowed down the cause as having the remote desktop session and Wine running.

I had Steam for Windows running so I could download a Windows game, and using the remote desktop session with it would cause the keyboard to go nuts.  The only way I could type after was reconnecting remotely and using the soft keyboard of the tablet.  Disconnecting and reconnecting the keyboard will not work, so it might be an X.org issue going on here.

Prepping for War: Laptop Compatibility List

Been digging up the Ubuntu forums and finding as much information as I can to make the most informed choice.  I found this thread which seems to be very informative.

Prepping for War

I had asked around for other laptops I could get without the wretched Microsoft Tax and they are: HP G4-2123TX and G4-2129TX.  Overall, the specifications look good except for the fact that they use AMD Radeon cards, which I have vowed never to ever buy again, and that Ubuntu support is rather mysterious.

To me, it looks like the Lenovo G480 has comparable specs to the G4-2123TX laptop but looks and sounds like it'll work better.  The nVIDIA graphics chip is also a neat bonus on top of it.  So, I've begun digging up as much as I can over its hardware compatibility woes.  The only one I've seen is the lack of the alx driver for the network interface card.  Here are the additional details on the issue and the solution from the Ubuntu launchpad ticket.

A few thoughts...

My DSi XL suddenly refused to connect to my WiFi even though it works on all my devices including my old banged up DS (circa 2004).  After a short check with Nintendo's site, they recommended a Quick Power Cycle (QPC) of the router.  I unplugged my DSL modem (disconnected while playing SWTOR!!!) and my router (for 30 seconds) and hooked everything back.  My DSi XL connected once again fine.

Been slowly pushing my graphics detail on SWTOR while still playing on Wine and am noticing a few things.  Unlike Witcher 2 where I played on horribly low resolutions, I couldn't take 800x600 on SWTOR.  Adding Bloom and High Shader Complexity slowed the game down too much, but setting the Shader Complexity to low gave the game a nice layer of polish while not compromising too much in terms of performance.  Still managed to play the game at 1024x768 on Wine.  So, nice!

A New Laptop for a New Year

The Great Hunt is on.  With my old faithful Acer Aspire on its last breaths, I felt that I needed to look for a new laptop that provided me with some performance and portability plus comes with a blank OS or Ubuntu pre-installed.   This is a tough order as most machines here come with Microsoft stuff tacked on.  I found a reasonably priced Lenovo G480 that comes with no OS and while I feel like I could roll the dice for this machine, I've read threads about its compatibility woes with Ubuntu, at least with 12.04.

All this has made me go through Ubuntu's rather useless site of certified hardware.  The website is rather useless when it comes to searching for performance equipment, so I had to do some Google magic on it.  My preliminary list of target hardware are:

i7 CPUs

• Lenovo V480
• Lenovo V580
• Lenovo Thinkpad W530
• Lenovo Thinkpad W510
• Lenovo Thinkpad T510

i5 CPU Laptop
Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E530

Ubuntu friendly just don't cut the mustard anymore for me.  I'm looking to zip and go so I'm hoping to see what the machine specs are.  Hopefully they are sold here without an OS too!

Reading Oracle Exception Errors

Something I've never really been accustomed to is deciphering Oracle's cryptic feedback.  Those OCI_NO_DATA errors are downright frustrating, but at least I know better now.  Always have exception handlers (exception when no_data_found) your blast triggers.  And learn how to read Oracle's line numbering!