Recently bought a new laptop from a friend of mine, for $350 - a retail value of $1200 maybe... good deal I must say.
the only thing wrong with it was that it had Vista (eww!)
so, after installing Kubuntu 7.10 on it (cuz 8.04 was acting funky on it)
I installed wine, downloaded AO 17.0 installer overnight and I'm posting this to possibly help others who might have patching issues like I did.
1) From a fresh 17.0 install, I copied my AnarchyPatcher.exe to my desktop as backup
2) normal patching went smooth up until 17.5.2-EP1->17.5.3-EP1
** AnarchyPatcher.exe threw an error "An unsupported operation was attempted"
3) Noticed that the "Prefs" folder was missing, so I created it and set write permissions to it. - it's VERY important to have the right permissions.
4) deleted the AnarchyPatcher.exe from my "wine drive" and replaced it with my backup from desktop.
then opened my terminal window, navigated to my AO folder and manualy executed the patch
xyphos@satellite:~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Funcom/Anarchy\ Online$ wine AnarchyPatcher.exe 17.5.3_EP1
**this managed to patch it to 17.6.0_EP1 - had to recopy my backup AnarchyPatcher.exe because the game launcher automaticaly downloaded the borked version.
5) repeated step 4, with ....Online$ wine AnarchyPatcher.exe 17.6.1_EP1
**this patched all the way up to 17.7.0_EP1 - had to recopy my backup AnarchyPatcher.exe because the game launcher automaticaly downloaded the borked version.
6) repeated step 4, with ....Online$ wine AnarchyPatcher.exe 17.7.1_EP1
** this patched all the way up to 17.8.0_EP1 - had to recopy my backup AnarchyPatcher.exe because the game launcher automaticaly downloaded the borked version.
7) repeated step 4, with ....Online$ wine AnarchyPatcher.exe 17.8.1_EP1
** this patched all the way up to 17.9.0_EP1 - had to recopy my backup AnarchyPatcher.exe because the game launcher automaticaly downloaded the borked version.
8) repeated step 4, with ....Online$ wine AnarchyPatcher.exe 17.9.1_EP1
done. AO was FINALLY patched to the latest version.
(now only if I can only get the game to launch, it crashes - perhaps a rendering device problem)