7i97 newbie questions

I bought a 7i97 board for my cnc project.
I found a manual online, but that's not helpful for total newbie.
I didn't find good start instructions for that board. How generic mesa board instructions are?
Where to start
I know how to wire up the board but everything els mystery

The 7I97 is very new so needs LinuxCNC builld from source with some
Mesa patches added currently

The hal file for a 7I97 would be close to a hal file for a 5I2X/7I33 with some minor changes

Found a youtube video that explains build from source.
So I have now some basic information
Just don't know what to build

How can I know what mesa patches to add and how I add them?

At this moment, I am running the machine whit mach 3 and step dir.
I clean a PC and installed newest linux cnc to it.

It seems that LinuxCNC and mesa boards are not so easy to use then mach 3 and uc100.
I got few linux specialist friend that I can ask help. If you can just help me to right direction

Thank you for the link.
I earlier manage to download and instal
linuxcnc-2.7.14-wheezy.iso to my old Dell T3500
So something is already installed and working

On that link there is a 4 different method to install.
What instructions I should follow?
1. is RIP version so not that?
2. includes LinuxCNC building that I already got in my linuxcnc-2.7.14-wheezy.iso install so not that ?
3. seems the right one?

I try to do as much as possible my self. My friend is coming next week some evening to help me (he work with linux every day)

Tomorow I am going to clean my Dell and install LinuxCNC from source whit my friend who know linux.
Where can I find those mesa patches that are just added?
How can I know what changes to do for the Hal file?

Changed source files:



(unzip in linuxcnc source tree/ src/hal/drivers/mesa-hostmot2 and move Makefile to /src)

Very basic example hal/ini file for 7I97:

First we changed source files and run in to problem

the build failed with this error message
cannot stat '../lib/python/qtvcp/widgets/*.ui': No such file or directory
Line 678

After that we managed to install linuxcnc with unmodified files.

on both installation we get this error
./configure -r

your kernel '4.1.0-1-rtai-amd64' is not known. There might be needed dependencies which won't get set automatically.
successfully configured for 'LinuxMint-18'-'4.1.0-1-rtai-amd

should we use some different version of linuxcnc with these modified files?
We used the latest master

Your errors are not related to the new files, but a basic issue is that you
need to build the userspace version of LinuxCNC on a system with a Preempt-RT kernel.

Probably the easiest way to do this is to download the LinuxCNC/uspace
stretch ISO, install the LinuxCNC source, update the driver source, and build
a uspace version of LinuxCNC

www.linuxcnc.org/testing-stretch-rtpreempt/

linuxcnc.org/docs/master/html/code/building-linuxcnc.html

Thank you fro your quick answer.
We where using the method 3
(Installing pre-compiled RTAI Kernel from apt using .debs )
Was this a wrong solution?
forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...install-or-deb#86438