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Gunnells, Brad R brad-gunnells at uiowa.edu
Wed Apr 8 13:22:17 PDT 2020


A couple thoughts on this.

Any reason to not use your iMac? If you don't like Apple Numbers and want a more Microsoft Excel feeling application you could use Apache's Open Office. It's free open source software similar to Libre Office.

As for linux and your USB Wifi adapter. I wonder if running it off a USB stick is a more limited install that may not have the full compliment of drivers available? I haven't played with it lately but I had an old D-Link USB wireless adapter that I thought I'd used with Ubuntu and there weren't any hoops to jump through. But it's been some time so don't remember exactly. As others have said, I'd pass it by on the Mint forums and see if someone there might point you in the right direction. I don't think Wine is the solution here IMHO.

Brad
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From: AT <at-bounces at lists.antique-tractor.com> on behalf of Stephen Offiler <soffiler at gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 8, 2020 2:00 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Subject: [External] [AT] [OT] Back to Linux Discussion

We were discussing Linux a few weeks ago, and after deciding Mint/Mate would be a good choice, I had some initial success booting and running off a thumb drive. Then, I kind of set it aside.

Now, renewed interest as my employer would like to see more work from home.  While I'm on the shop floor a lot, I do have a ton of paperwork as well.  I have my home computer (iMac) remote-connected to my workstation at work, which is... OK at best.  There are several things I find a bit annoying, and they'd mostly be resolved if I had two machines at home.

Back to that old laptop.  The Libre Office package that comes with Linux is perfect for my needs, but I need to get it talking to my WiFi at home.  I've got a Netgear USB Wifi interface for that laptop (tested, works fine under Windows) but Linux just ignores it.  Google to the rescue.  The solution involves Wine, a compatibility layer that allows Windows stuff to run under Linux.

Problem - during the Wine install, I got a message that I was out of memory.  The bootable thumb drive is 128GB, so it sure as holy heck isn't full.  I have been hearing that operation off a thumb drive relies heavily on RAM.  This laptop has 4 GB.  I was taking the memory error to mean the thumb drive, but that's clearly wrong.  Maybe I need more than 4GB of RAM?  Anybody run into anything like this, any words of wisdom?

(Laptop is a Dell Precision M4400, a workstation-class machine when it was new in 2008.  I used to run Solidworks on it)

Steve O.
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