These new fangled netbooks that run ubuntu such as the Dell Mini 9 are great. One problem, as mentioned in an earlier post on this blog (see Related Posts) is that when you download an application like skype or adobe flash player that isn’t in the repositories you get a .deb file for linux and when you try to install it the debian package manager will complain that there is an architecture mismatch because are attempting to install an i386 package on an lpia processor. You can use a commandline switch to force the install but you won’t be able to automatically uninstall it later.

As I mentioned in that previous post, you can just repackage the *_i386.deb file into a *_lpia.deb file manually, but now it is even easier than that as there is now a helper script to do it automatically thanks to the helpful guys on the ubuntu forums. Just unzip this i386 deb to lpia helper script file into the directory where you want to run it (or into your scripts directory), set it to executable and then run it from the directory with the *_i386.deb file. You don’t need to specify any parameters, but the deb package must end _i386.deb (rename it if you have to):

cd /path/to/my/i386/deb/file
wget http://www.matt-helps.com/pub/deb2lpia.sh.tar.gz
tar -xvzf deb2lpia.sh.tar.gz
rm deb2lpia.sh.tar.gz
chmod +x deb2lpia.sh
deb2lpia.sh

Hope that helps.

(updated for v1.1 of the script)

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