Some of you may have followed my trials and frustrations in trying to get an old XP driven Dell computer to live again. This computer is at a vacation house and I hated to spend money on a new computer. I run eggbeaters and an ft847 there. Here are outcomes, good and bad so far.
1) installed Ubuntu and was confident this would be the solution and it might still, however even the latest version of GPredict is buggy. I suspect the real culprit is Hamlib.
2) I installed Wine in Ubuntu in hopes of getting SatPC32 to run. This nearly worked but a few features didn't. For example I could not switch between modes using SatPC32 and I'm not certain that the CAT frequency adjust is working. Further investigation is required here.
3) I then discovered CrossOver which essentially is a commercial version of Wine for the Mac. Since I never leave home without a Mac laptop I decided to try a CrossOver demo. It took a while and some good "Elmer" support using the terminal program to configure the comm port, but once I solved that problem I found that the MacBook Pro running CrossOver will run SatPC32 perfectly! CrossOver is reasonably priced for your Mac.
So that's where I ended up. I've not yet abandoned learning my way around Linux as it's been a good learning experience and I really appreciate the online support I received from fellow hams.
73 Rick W2JAZ