Wyrtual Life

Finally, i found a new cozy permanent place to build my nest in.

As everything comes differently from what you plan in life, my little trip to do some oyster farming lasted for the amazing length of a whole day and i found myself driving 1500 km down the east coast back to Melbourne in this little big beauty. Not only does it look good, has four wheels and ran reliably the whole distance, it also provided me with enough space to sleep for a night. And all that for just 800 bucks.

It was always a bit of an issue for me that wordpress can’t autotranslate my postings into the language you want to read it in. Of cause the real problem here was that incident with the babel tower. In neither case i have the power to do something about it. Hence i just decided to do it the Salvatore way (The name of the rose) and write in whatever language suits me at the moment. I’d love that to be finnish, but i’m afraid i won’t…so you’ll mostly read english here, spiced up with a good ounce of german salt.

So, Lenovo just released the T61, it’s second incarnation of the T6x series.

And i must say i’m at least slightly pleased and a little surprised with what i’m seeing.

When the ThinkPad brand got handed over to Lenovo i was a bit sceptical, to say the least…and the first couple of models that came out of the new home didn’t impress me much. But now, here’s something different…Lenovo seems to be able to focus on sensible features rather than tech specs. So what have we got…

First of all, the T61 comes with a so called Magnesium roll cage.

Ain’t it beautiful. This almost makes my good old T41p look cheap.

The other nice innovation is the optional 1GB of “Turbo Memory”. Ohh these marketing buzz words. However, what this is is the idea of a hybrid harddisk made independent of the harddisk. Huh? Well…it is 1GB of Flash memory that caches harddisk access and can hence speed up harddisk operations significantly. The advantage over a hybrid harddisk solution, obviously is that you can exchange the harddisk without loosing the flash caching.

Lastly, the T61 features a standard firewire port, now. Good.

So, Lenovo, i’m impressed. Though, this get’s deminished by quite a few little glitches in the new models design:

• the Turbo Memory occupies one of the two express card slots (it should have been internal)
• all usb ports are vertical, whereas horizontal would be the preferred layout
• the audio plugs have been moved to the front (which is nonsense, side is perfect for them)
• the vga port is still in the middle of the left side (the back of either side or on the back side would be better
• apparently, all models are widescreen now (as long as there’s a UXGA+ option, that’s fine)
• the large left display border on the 14″ models is ugly

So…as you probably found in your googling, people seem to be happily running InDesign 2.0 under wine. Some even seem to have found a way to get Photoshop CS 2 running. But most attempts to have a go at InDesign 3.0 aka CS fail at the end of the splash screen.

You can do something about this: open you winecfg, create a InDesign.exe application profile and create the following dll overrides: comctl32 (builtin, native), comdlg32, commctrl (native, builtin), ole2, ole32, oleaut32, rpcltc1, rpcltc5, rpcltccm, rpclts5, rpcltspx, rpcmqcl, rpcmqsvr, rpcns4, rpcrt4. Set them all to native if not otherwise given in parentheses here.

Of course you will need the according dlls in you fakewin/windows/system32 dir. ies4linux can get them for you.

This will make both the installer and InDesign.exe run almost flawlessly.

However…a critical remaining issue is that the open and save dialogs don’t show up. Apparently there is a problem with actctx. From what i’ve googled it seems it’s a core kernel32 part that was introduced in Windows XP and needs to be implemented in wine core. It also seems it’s one of the working areas at the wine project.

I’m using 0.9.29 (which is what gentoo has currently). Maybe there’s improvement in 0.9.35 already? If anyone could shed more light into this…

Hei guys. Finally, i managed to get Wordpress running again. From browsing the web, i could figure that the possibilities with this new version are great. Plus I’m using Flickr for my photos now and will integrate them through a plugin. Just need to make a decision about the right one. And i guess i need to customize the theme to something i really like. So i’ll keep yous posted.