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 short notes on the backport of Wine

Before I forget, there were a few nuances with the packages I backported (into Karmic) from the Wine PPA site that Scott Ritchie provided (for Maverick and other Ubuntu releases).

Firstly, the orig tar gzipped file had wine folder name while the diff expected wine1.3 which is the release name. I had to repackage the orig.tar.gz file to use wine1.3 folder name.

On the control file, I had to deal with debhelper version checking which I'm pretty sure is caused by the new Ubuntu releases moving to newer versions of files. I saw two other new items, gcc-4.5-multilib and oss4-dev of which I removed as dependency. I'm fairly certain that Wine will compile on old GCC 3.x so, the requirement of GCC 4 looked a little silly from my point of view. I don't plan to release the package to the masses anyway, so it won't hurt anybody but me.

Final touches, I updated the changelog also to reflect karmic version numbering and then removed the reference CC="gcc-4.5" on the rules file to avoid forcing GCC 4 when building. Everything built fine and wine is running well after packaging and installing.