7i96S card setup issues -- board discovery & red LED

I'm giving up on Mint (2.9) and attempting to go from scratch with Debian Buster (2.8.4) since it is said to be compatible with 7i96S and seems to be the more accepted path.

Thanks, Tommylight, for the helpful info, however, my the time I saw it I had already scrapped Mint in process of switching to Buster. I got the sense that Mint is not the more accepted path.

You might try side stepping the LinuxCNC install issues by using JTs mesact configuration tool instead of pncconf

(or installing the 2.8.4 ISO)

I had already switched to starting from scratch with 2.8.4 ISO. However, even after having done so, there are still issues. Two things:

One, on the MESA Card 0 setup TB3, inputs, the menu for "Plasma" choices disappeared, so, for instance, I cannot choose "Float Z" for the needed input. None of the Plasma choices are showing. I tried both 7i96 and 7i96S choices in the drop down, and tried both firmware options, d, and dpl, and nothing seems to make the "Plasma" menu option show up. 

Two, the board discovery still is not working. I am getting the following error when trying board discovery.



At this point, in desperation, I guess I am left to look into using JTs mesact configuration tool instead of pncconf.

Here is a screen shot of the menu without any "Plasma" choices.

Perhaps the Plasma options are not supposed to show yet. However, somehow on my initial install, which was based on Mint, the Plasma options were showing from the start.

I didn't realize you were setting up a plasma machine. If you wish to use Plasmac I think you need to run master (was 2.9 and is 2.10 currently)

OK, but I'm a bit confused. The PlasmaC user guide says "The preferred method for installing LinuxCNC (which contains PlasmaC by default) is via an ISO image as described below."

Does your instruction here mean that 2.8.4 from the main branch (using Buster) does not contain PlasmaC?