Emcoturn 120 lathe retrofit

Having the kernel there but unused does no harm. You probably want to run halcompile under the kernel that you intend to use the components with, however. (I know you didn't ask that, but it wasn't clear if halcompile is working for you under uspace)

The uspace-dev package is in the same place as the linuxcnc base deb. same process:
buildbot.linuxcnc.org/dists/wheezy/2.7-rtpreempt/binary-i386/

or apt-get install linuxcnc-uspace-dev

LutzTD wrote:

still trying to understand the whole linuxcnc load. as I understand it my next step is to run the linuxcnc configuration program and input all of the axis, step i/o using a 7176 pci as the setup, then go in and edit the ini and hal to change the entries "hm2_pci" to "hm2_eth", change the card name and add the 10.10.10.1 ethernet address? Is this correct?

That is one way. An alternative is to take an example config then manually change that to suit your hardware. However there doesn't seem to be a pre-built sample config for 7i76E in the supplied configs.

In the early days of LinuxCNC there were no config generator wizards. The underlying idea has always been that the HAL and INI files are human-readable and human-editable and are the basis of the configuration. Stepconf and PnCConf are intended to get the skeleton of a config put together (and for a simple machine with a common hardware setup, often this is entirely adequate).

Once I do that I can no longer edit the file using the config tool? what if I need to change the config because I did some thing wrong? At this point am I added changes to the code manually? Just trying to get a grasp on this.

In your case, once you have started to hand-edit the files, that is what you will carry on doing.

The HAL file format is a simple scripting language. You can use it separately from LinuxCNC and this is often a very useful way to debug a system. For example you can try out HAL commands outside the HAL file to see if they work. In fact, in your current position, I would suggest doing exactly that. Open a terminal and try the following.

If all is well, then loadrt hm2_eth won't return any error codes, and "show pin" will list a bunch of HAL pins on the 7i76.

If that doesn't work, then you can try again immediately:

One you have loaded the hm2_eth driver successfully you can manually operate the board of you want to, but to do that you need to start the realtime threads and add the read/write functions to them.That will list the realtime functions related to the board. probably "hm2_7i76e.0.read" hm2_7i76e.0.write and but maybe not. You may have a read_gpio and write_gpio, we won't be using those.I would expect a slow blinking green light on the 7i76 at this point.
You may be able to change the state of some user-leds on the board at this point. but see the manpage for reasons that they might not work. I have guessed the pin names, you should have them in the scroll-back of the terminal from the "show pin" command
when finished
These commands, and others like them, are what is in the HAL file. It's all about loading the drivers, configuring the hardware and linking signals and IO where they belong. Don't think of it as a program though, its a configuration script that runs once at startup.

linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/man/man9/hm2_eth.9.html