I have sort of a little situation wherein I have a Lenovo Ideacentre flex20, an older Asus laptop, a monitor arm, and a couple oldish monitors I want to set use in a dual screen setup with the previously mentioned monitor arm.
I’ll start off saying I’m cheap, and I got most of the stuff above for free or for very low price at a thrift store.
As you see above, I have 2 computers. Each have things I like, but neither one has everything I need for what I want to do. The main issue is that the Ideacentre is a tabletop computer(which can almost be thought of as a really large tablet) with a decent processor and memory but it only has USB 3.0 ports. That’s it - no VGA, no HDMI, no DVI, no bueno. On the other hand, the laptop has a shitty celeron processor but has a USB 3.0 port and also the port I need for connecting to the monitors.
So, what I want to do is basically run the ideacentre tabletop as the main computer and connect it to the laptop so I can display things on the dual monitor setup.
As in keeping with my frugal ways, I plan to use Linux(mint 19.0). Also, just in case anyone is thinking this, I have not found any USB to HDMI/VGA/DVI converters that support Linux.
Is there anything in particular I should do in the settings to achieve the optimal functionality/speed?
The good news with USB 3.0 and host-to-host connections is that a fairly simple crossover cable can be used. (You do not use an ordinary USB 3.0 cable.)
The bad news is that it’s not natively supported by Windows software. Not sure who makes any software that can use these in a simple way, but it probably isn’t free.
The old school method is a data transfer cable that has a dongle in it that fakes having an external device (like a DVD drive) at one end so you can transfer files one way easily.
Personally, I would not go this way. And I’m a big fan of doing computer things cheaply.
It’s not possible to use USB as a general purpose networking or video interface between two host devices. The best thing to do in your situation is install VNC remote desktop software to remotely access the one computer’s desktop from the other.
Use Wifi, not USB, as you will use up the USB ports. A Linux expert will be along shortly but I think you will just have to make sure both are running X Windows then set up a X session from one to the other. If you really want to use USB 3, then TP-Link sell an adapter. You will, of course, need two.
If you want to run Windows then you need Windows Professional and you run MSTSC on the laptop to connect to the Ideacentre.
That’s the second thing I was thinking of, and it would be even cheaper I think - I wouldn’t have to buy a bridge cable. I’m trying to think in my head how this would work exactly in terms of efficiency; I want to use the processing power of the Ideacentre, but I wonder if simultaneously running on the other machine for display purposes will slow things down a lot. I don’t know enough about these things to figure it out on my own.
Essentially what you’re doing is using the Ideacentre as an application server, and running a thin client on the laptop through VNC. And that’s viable, that concept has been done successfully for decades in various environments. You will undoubtedly suffer a bit of lag but you never know how bad it will be until you try it.
I’ve done this myself at a few different organizations I’ve supported over the years; for example at one company they had a bunch of employees who wanted to use Acrobat Pro but only intermittently, so they bought one license and I installed it on a regular desktop machine that others could remote into using RDP.
I don’t see how; the license is installed on one machine, is only used by one person at a time, and is only being used by the corporation that purchased it for its own internal use. It’s no different than letting multiple people sit down at the computer to log into it and use the computer, you just remove the inconvenience of walking over to the machine. In any case, the licensing for this situation seems as clear as mud when I just now looked it up, and also this was almost 15 years ago…
Yes that’s what I’m trying to do, I just don’t have the level of experience that makes it easy for me to describe it clearly in technical terms. Would the lag likely be minimal for uses such as web surfing and doing basic Java and Javascript programming?
I don’t use Linux, but have used VNC on my various Windows PCs. It’s okay for web browsing, but video will likely be choppy due to the lag.
I know you said you’re cheap, but for less than <$100, probably way less on Craigslist, you can get a good used PC. Saving money and frankensteining what you have is fun, but the time you waste due to VNC lag adds up quickly.
If you’re going to just hook them both up to your network, and you need something faster than VNC’s slow updating, I’m a really big fan of Splashtop Personal. It’s so fast that you can I can actually watch a video, and it will keep it in sync (and stream the audio). There’s even a tablet app, which I sometimes use.
It may be better running with the server (Personal app) on the faster computer, and connecting to it (using the Streamer) with the slower one. The encoding process can be a bit intensive on older hardware.
The only downside is that you have to create an account on their servers, and both computers have to be connected to the Internet. The actual session doesn’t run over the Internet, but you have to use the Internet to connect to other one. (This is common in desktop sharing software, to get around firewalls.)
Just use USB 3 -> HDMI/Display Port dongles. USB 3 has excellent bandwidth and this will work well. Also this avoids a ton of hassle with one computer doing the rendering but another computer doing the display. This will be hundreds of times more compatible. (literally - hundreds of TIMES as many total programs will work, using a USB 3 video adapter through Windows instead of the mentioned Linux/X-server solution)
I’m not sure if I’m clear about what you are talking about, but if I’m understanding it right some of this was already addressed in my OP. Maybe you could point me to some specific products that you think would suit my needs, anything I’ve seen similar to what you’ve mentioned is a bit pricey.
Do you know the make and model of the computers involved? Without that we can’t tell for sure what connections are available.
Also, what connections does the monitor have? I don’t see that in your OP.
I agree with SamuelA that you should look for an adapter that allows you to connect the computer directly to the monitor. You’ll save a lot of frustration and troubleshooting time.
I appreciate your efforts to be helpful, but that does not support Linux, which is exactly what I mentioned in the OP as the issue with such devises.
I think Big T offered a really good solution that solves the problem without costing a dime. I’ll try that when I have a chance to set it up. If it doesn’t work I might explore other options - probably sell both and get a refurbished tower sans OS on the cheap from Newegg.
