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!

Some random ramblings...

If your Ubuntu desktop crashes and you lose all your desktop icons, open a terminal and run nautilus to bring it back.

If you have custom made .desktop launchers on the desktop, you can copy the files into /usr/local/share/applications so the Dash Home search can pick it up and execute them.

Uninstalling Adobe Reader 9 Linux (SH installer)

I found out a tad bit late that Adobe didn't package 64-bit versions of the Reader so my 64-bit Firefox machine couldn't pick up the plugin.  I went ahead and dug up how to uninstall this dumb plugin.  Most of it is in /opt/Adobe/Reader9 which contains most of the stuff, but you might discover that you still have shortcut icons on it especially if you use the Dash Home search.

Check /usr/local/share/applications and your desktop for the AdobeReader.desktop file and purge them.  Then, look for the nppdf.so plugin install paths in /usr/lib/firefox-addons/plugins and /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins.

I didn't find anymore traces after that so you should be fine after.

Star Wars: The Old Republic and Wine Update

From last night's update, it seems that SWTOR has been improved to a point where the game actually starts from the launcher window.  I am unsure as to whether or not it's a fluke, but when it did, I got the Star Wars splash screen but the game did freeze after that.  I then went ahead and used the same workaround to get the game running, but I will perhaps improve the script to make sure it's getting the right hash, if it turns out the launcher just doesn't work at all even with this new progress.