Brand New LinuxCNC setup - advice welcome!

Hi, everyone;

I've just bought a CNC router with a 4th axis unit from DigitalWoodCarver.com -- WITHOUT his usual Windows software -- because I hate Windows in a serious way. His CNC unit just needs to talk Gecko G540, he says, and it's happy. His typical setup is to do your CAD CAM work on another computer, take a USB stick over to the desktop driving the router and input the g-code. Sounds good to me.

I run 7 computers at my house, all Ubuntu 12.04 at the moment. One of them needs to have good CAD CAM software installed that will let me create the g-code to carry over to the router. I could use some advice on what that software should be.

And I have the next three weeks to decide on a desktop computer to drive the CNC router. I have a dustproof cabinet for it, and assume it will run Ubuntu 10.04 more or less permanently. All it will do is talk to the router, via parallel or USB, whichever actually does the job best. Remember, I have a little turning lathe to drive, too, if that matters to the setup.

Between my working desktop where I spend much of my day, and this new CNC driver computer, I need to gather up the software, cards, RAM, and any other components I'll need to get rolling with the CNC router. I'd like to go with things this community has actually tested and proven.

What choices would you make if you were starting from scratch, gentlemen?

Thanks,

Selvaswami

Hi

I run 7 computers at my house, all Ubuntu 12.04 at the moment.
............
And I have the next three weeks to decide on a desktop computer to drive the CNC router.

As a quick start to decide which computers seem suitable, download the 10.04 Live CD iso and burn it.
Then run it from the CD on each of your computers with a parallel port and do the latency-test.

That should quickly narrow down which is the most promising

Make and model does not always help much, manufacturers are forever changing specs and chipsets within a model range.

regards

Thanks to everyone for the advice.

The seven Ubuntu computers in my shop are defended to the death by their operators, so none of those are going to be experimented with. Mine will load the CAD CAM software, so I hope it does not need to be downgraded to Ubuntu 10.04. I'll build a second box just for it if that is the case.

One thing I did come across in my web reading is that Nvidia cards and drivers aren't the best for CAD CAM. They cause problems. It didn't say what or why.

Is this so? Is there a better graphics card to choose?

Thanks again,

Selvaswami

+1 on what andy said. I am goign to try out a linux CAD software that has been around forever apparently and I have just never heard of it, VariCad. Starting my trial now and will see how it is. I played with alibre which is decent, but varicad runs on aALL OSes, so that wins big big points in my book. Migrating over to a cheap package from SW is gonna be rough tho.