<div dir="ltr">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.  <div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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?<br></div><div><br></div><div>(Laptop is a Dell Precision M4400, a workstation-class machine when it was new in 2008. I used to run Solidworks on it)</div><div><br></div><div>Steve O.</div></div>