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[Stephen Offiler]

I've got a modern, powerful workstation on my desk at work that runs
Solidworks 2020 plus several browser windows, the company's enterprise
management software, and a couple spreadsheets wall at once without
breaking a sweat.  At home, I use remote software over VPN so the iMac is
actually just a keyboard and display; all the real processing is getting
done on the work machine.  But. The iMac is just a 21" monitor and I've got
dual 27" / 21" at work, so it is necessary to collapse things down, not run
so much at once, etc.  It gets annoying trying to figure out new ways to
work with limited monitor space.  That's one problem.  The other problem is
everybody and his brother must be streaming Netflix all day, because I've
also got latency issues that compound the annoyance.  My scheme is to get a
second machine going at home, so the iMac/work machine are doing only
Solidworks and enterprise mgmt; the browsers and spreadsheets would run on
the second machine.   Incidentally, we use Libre Office at work, and I use
that at home on the iMac as well.  Not a fan of Numbers.  I was not
surprised to find Libre Office bundled with Linux Mint.

SO


On Wed, Apr 8, 2020 at 4:22 PM Gunnells, Brad R <brad-gunnells at uiowa.edu>
wrote:

> 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
> ------------------------------
> *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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