[sf-lug] My latest NUC adventure

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Akkana Peck (akkana at shallowsky.com):

> Rick, thanks for the info about the VMware vCenter Converter. I'll
> definitely try that, assuming I actually get this hypothetical new
> laptop.

It's not the only p2v converter utility, just the best-known
(and is free of charge).  Web-searching for obvious strings like 'p2v
migration' finds various articles on the subject.  I occasionally 
think about doing a real-world survey of the ones available without
charge, but there's the awkward fact that I don't have MS-Windows and 
don't really have any need to solve the p2v problem.

The one time I did put MS-Windows on a (work) machine, I did make a
point of doing it using VM technology, and it was extremely
satisfactory.  At the time, it helped that my firm had a corporate site
licence for VMware Workstation v. 5.5 (including the release for i386
Linux), and also for MS-Windows XP Pro.  I'd been hired to join the
Linux Management Dept. team at Cadence Design Systems, the huge
Electronic Design Automation firm in San Jose, around 2005, and was
issued a beautiful little IBM ThinkPad T42p (w/2GB RAM) with the
corporate preload of MS-Windows on it.  

The preload wasn't appropriate for my job in Linux Management, yet the firm
made very heavy use of MS-Exchange Server for scheduling and e-mail, and
also had a number of intranet Web sites haplessly implemented by
contractors with (apparently unintended) ActiveX dependencies -- so, I
needed to have highly reliable communication to Exchange Server, _and_ I 
absolutely needed MS-Internet Explorer because of the ActiveX problem.

Most of my colleagues were solving this problem the hard way, by running
bleeding-edge versions of Ximian Evolution (now GNOME Evolution) that
they compiled locally from tip-version source, and running MSIE under
WINE.  I respected their devotion, but noted that some of them reported
missing meetings because Evolution's still-buggy support for Exchange
calendar events let them down.  (The developers had been obliged to
reverse-engineer Microsoft's secret-sauce protocols.)  

My easier solution was to install Debian (configured to use the Window
Maker window manager) as my laptop's native OS, then VMware Workstation
for Linux on that, then the site-licensed WinXP Pro inside a VM.  So,
Linux and WinXP ran concurrently, and any time I needed MS-Outlook or
MSIE, they were there in the VMware guest-OS window.  Part of my point
is that this worked beautifully and never ran short on RAM or showed any
other performance problems.  (It helped that I eschew bloatware like
GNOME and KDE.)


At a later firm in the 2010s where I again had to make heavy use of
Exchange Server but didn't suffer the ActiveX intranet-site problem, I
ran Debian on a workstation with Mozilla Thunderbird w/Lightning
extension as my mail & scheduling program, and the magic that made this
able to reach Exchange Server was a nifty little thing called DavMail,
http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ .  DavMail is a gateway coded in Java
that runs as a user-spawned (~/.bashrc or whatever) daemon (e.g., ran as
me on my Debian workstation and continually does runs to Outlook Web
Access (OWA) on the Exchange server, essentially screen-scraping the OWA
WebUI, and then does a protocol conversion to transform the
Microsoft-protocol mail to normal SMTP/IMAP access and the scheduling
event data into Caldav/Carddav events (native to Mozilla Lightning).
The Exchange address book data is made available to the client as LDAP
data.  It's a slick workaround.  Works a treat.[1]


> Of course, I'll report back if I actually try this. First I have to
> find a laptop. (If anyone has opinions on lightweight 11-13"
> laptops that work well with Linux, I'm all ears.

This doesn't quite qualify because of its 14" screen (you said smaller),
but in recent years it's struck me that the ideal Linux laptop has been
the successive iterations of Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon.  Despite the
large screen, they're famously lightweight, e.g., the 2018 6th
generation X1 Carbon weighed 1.13 kg (2.5 lb).

Usual caveats about laptops and Linux apply, e.g., each revision of a
model might pose fresh challenges if the manufacturer suddenly
introduces a problematic chipset that doesn't yet have good Linux driver
support.  Specifically for ThinkPads, the ThinkWiki has always been a
pretty reliable Linux information resource, e.g.:
https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:Models

Always handy:  https://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

(I am unclear on what's up with Werner Heuser's http://tuxmobil.org/ ,
but the signs are not good:  It's had only an 'undergoing maintenance'
placeholder page for about a year.)


I am personally not a fan of sourcing laptops from Linux-specialty
hardware vendors so as to get _them_ to do the driver-support research
and sell you a Linux preload.  Personally, I don't want a Linux preload:
I want to install my own OS in my own way, and it's actually not _that_
difficult to research what chipsets a candidate laptop model comprises
and the adequacy of current Linux drivers.  Doing the latter, IMO, you
can get better hardware for the dollar -- though System76, Purism,
ZaReason, Linux Certified, ThinkPenguin, and Libiquity all have fans.


[1] It should work on all MS-Exchange Server sites except ones where 
administrators have gone out of their way to disable OWA access, but
this is reportedly rare.