New Lniux User's EMCAR Project

I have project that as been dropped my way and am looking for some support/ guidance.

The customer is trying to run some antenna spectrum testing.
I do some IT work for them, but I far more skilled with windows than linux. The customer in this case gave me a hp pc that he put ubuntu on trying to get emc2 to work on. but was having trouble with how to install it and better yet how to get the gpib card to work. (he looked on the site and saw linux so he konws it can work)

The Card he is using is the NI PCIe-GPIB with the NI 488.2 Drivers, As per NI's site they do not offer support for Ubuntu... but some have gotten it to work with 7.10 and 8.04

My questions comes down to 2 things
First has anyone used the NI PCIe-GPIB card with Emc2 ?
and better yet should i even be looking at EMC2 should I be trying to work with Linuxcnc?

If someone would like to help further I can get more in-depth as to what he is trying to do but for now I will try and start with the basics.

Thanks
JD

if your just looking at spectrum , would it not be better with National Instruments Developer suite
under windows ..

better to have an idea of the requirements and what results are needed I think .. rather than working blind
is this just FFT signalling or interfacing to specific gpib equipment and over what freq ranges

Essentially, They what they would like to do; to punch into the computer the following parameters:
A) Start Frequency
Stop Frequency
And have the computer send the GPIB commands to both the spectrum analyzer (receiver) and signal generator (transmitter) that pertain to start and stop frequencies. Also, would like the computer to run the stepper motor to complete a circle 360 degrees while the sig gen and SA are taking readings on a per degree basis.

They are looking to use EMCAR 0.1 which I understand to be 2008 pre-alpha release emcar.sourceforge.net/

Like I said this what kinda just dropped in my lap and to told to try and make it work, so I am trying to learn and absorb as much as I can.

arh just looked at EMCAR , yes should be just about all there as well , all depends on the GPIB interfaces , and or possibly DAQ interface , should be easy enough.

I see theirs already a python interface to comedi
pypi.python.org/pypi/pycomedi

link to comedi if anyone is wondering
www.comedi.org/index.html