Tiny Computer with Printer port

Hi

Finally got to the bottom of the problems with set up.

The IDE is screwy, DMPs own site suggests that kernels before 2.6.28 don't support it properly.

This was reflected in 2.6.24 kernels not booting, with errors about not being able to find disc UUID or the root path expressed as /dev/sda1 etc

However later kernels did boot, both the stock 2.6.32-122-rtai and a 2 homebrew ones compiled by myself and Andy.

The problem then was that Linuxcnc would not run, throwing what was resolved to be a LAPIC error.
Since the GRUB commandline entry lapic had no effect, quite possible this processor does not use it, (APIC is a generic Intel thing) which makes it unlikely 10.04 will ever run on it?

Some further thought and experimentation led to my changing the BIOS IDE settings.
I changed IDE Operate Mode from Legacy to Native mode
Standard IDE Compatible was changed from Disabled to Enabled.

I then found that I could boot 2.6.24 kernels, both RT and generic, so long as they were on the first primary partition.
If you tried to boot from a second or extended partition, they failed as before.

CF card was reconfigured to one 8GB partition, put in a card reader of a machine that would boot the 8.04 Live CD and installed onto
( Set the installation to boot from the MBR of the CF card not hd0 or you will overwrite your machines MBR! )
/boot/grub/menu.lst edited to correct the root address

The resulting installation boots and runs Linuxcnc (well Emc2 2.3 at present)

Next step is to get the r6040 ethernet module working and then we can upgrade the system to 2.5 and start some meaningful testing

regards

Hi

Getting the ethernet module (r6040) to compile for a 2.6.24 kernel proved a nightmare.

The r6040.c contained deprecated defines and functions and 2.6.24 from kernel.org proved almost unable to be compiled.
Apart from the header and code changes required, a lot of the constructs only worked with gcc 3.23 and now throw errors with gcc 4.xx

The kernel-source deb from Ubuntu was patched and appeared it would compile with the gcc supplied in Ubuntu 8.04
Unfortunately there were several compiler internal errors until a fatal one which threw a SIGFAULT and refused to pass over the offending code.

Anthony has supplied a pre-compiled kernel, headers, realtime and emc2 for Ubuntu 10.04

The kernel boots fine and at last there is a properly functioning r6040 module and synaptic works again.

The realtime package does not install properly, closing with errors part way through.
It appears unable to find install-sh, even though it exists in the path that it is looking for it

I manually extracted the files to /usr/realtime and ran make install on the pre-compiled emc package.

The resulting installation started emc but failed to load hal because the path it was using was /usr/lib/modules//usr/lib/modules/rtai or similar

So, I have recompiled a new CVS of magma, using the supplied .rtai-config with the addition of C99 maths support.
I have also recompiled a 2.5 RIP of Linuxcnc against the supplied kernel and realtime

The result:- I now have Linuxcnc 2.5 running on Ubuntu 10.04 on the NCBOX !!! Hurrah.

Tomorrow I will package the relevant files and discuss with JT where we can host them so that everyone else coming to this can do a straight forward download and install.

Thank you Anthony, the kernel was the edge we needed

regards

And this 'proof of life' screenshot was posted from the NCBOX

Post and links withdrawn - superseded by impending post