LinuxCNC from source - RIP Environment problems

Hi

check configure:4732

It is not building rtai, I dont know what is wrong with rtai-config, but the immediate suggestion is
run ./configure --with-rtai-kernel
and see if this forces it to build rtai

regards

EDIT: have attached my rtai-config, but yours should be the same
remove the txt extension and ensure chmod 755

My rtai-config is different to yours. Configure shows a message something like "checking usability of /usr/realtime/bin/rtai-config....no" and then builds pre-empt instead. I get the same error using your rtai-config. And yes, I did chmod 755 it after copying it to /usr/realtime/bin/rtai-config. Sounds like a kernel issue??

Sounds like a kernel issue??

It can't be, I am running exactly the same kernel now.

I am going install a fresh copy of Debian on a new partition and build the whole lot from sources again on it over the next couple of days.

I have no idea why you can't build linuxcnc, that snapshot is the same one I have running on this computer, that was why I chose it.

In the interim I have taken down the pages on my website.

regards

It's certainly an odd one. It's probably something simple like a missing dependency or incorrect version. I just can't understand why my kernel seems to be installing differently to yours?

I'm putting a bash script together to automate everything, so basically all I'll need to do is install Debian and then run my script to install the kernel and linuxcnc.

I've just searched "rtai" in synaptic and it has thrown up the following packages which are NOT currently installed. I would think that I should have at least SOME of these installed? The rtai package seems to be the most obvious one...

You have rtai, it is in /usr/realtime, it was compiled from sources.

Don't install anything from packages, they will screw up everything.

Just to update

You will be glad to know I have hit the same problem, rtai modules not building. I know how it occurs but not why.

I am going back to the original versions of sources and re build everything. See how that goes

And I was beginning to think that I must be the Village Idiot! Surprised this hasn't been found before. Am I your guinea pig, or have others used your sources without issues?

BTW, you owe me 100 hours of my life back.

EDIT:
I'm quite interested in the technicalities of this as I like to know how things work 'under the bonnet'. Can you recommend any guides, info pages, gotchas, etc that will explain in detail the whole process of compiling a custom rt kernel and configuring/setting up linuxcnc from source?

And I was beginning to think that I must be the Village Idiot! Surprised this hasn't been found before. Am I your guinea pig, or have others used your sources without issues?

You were not a guinea pig, I have it running on 2 partitions on this machine and a Non SMP version running both of my workshop machines, cutting metal.
Someone else is running the non SMP version too.

My problem in the new install highlighted a symbol missing from the headers, which is the one that this development version of Linuxcnc uses to determine if it is a RTAI kernel.
This is why no rtai build with linuxcnc.
All my builds were against kernel sources, but that is impractical to distribute, so I use kpkg and it obviously did not build the headers properly.

But then I found that the latest kernel patch in the realtime sources, does not seem to build the kernel properly, so I am reverting to the old sources and old patches to try to narrow the problem down.
(which means I spent most of yesterday on it and got nowhere )
I don't think I will bother trying to host debs again, when I get it sorted, don't have the time to support them really

Sebs debs of a slightly earlier kernel should work for you
highlab.com/~seb/linuxcnc/rtai-for-3.4-prerelease/

I'm quite interested in the technicalities of this as I like to know how things work 'under the bonnet'

This will give an overview of the process, but it is out of date
code.google.com/p/neo-technical/wiki/emc2ubuntu

I think you already found Sebs page about building linuxcnc, the important thing is that the one I used is a branch of the master, called the unified-build-candidate-3.
If you search the developers archive you will be able to read about it and get some git urls to download it

I'll let you know when I resolve it

regards

All resolved and in the process I have switched to gcc-4.6.
4.4 was a legacy thing from Ubuntu 10.04, because it uses it and when I found 4.7 had a bug I just reverted to 4.4 I had been using.

The reason Linuxcnc would not build rtai modules, was because the Modules.symvers built by make-kpkg headers did not have an export symbol rt_daemonize
The ubc-3 branch of Lcnc uses its presence to test if the kernel is a rtai one, so when not found it did not build them.
Even if you hacked configure to force a build, the headers had other symbol problems which prevented it running.

In the process of building a new rtai kernel to test things, I used the version 4 of the RTAI 3.5.7 kernel patch
This not only produced the same error, but other ones too resulting in problems with rtai_math later on

So on a vanilla 3.5.7 kernel, with version 3 of the RTAI kernel patch, a legacy version of Shabbys RTAI repo, I can build the legacy version of Lcnc and in fact the latest pull
from Michael H's git repo too

So I will repackage in the next couple of days and try to make my own headers from the full compiled sources, to prevent another issue using kpkg

The only thing you will have to do is remove gcc-4.4 etc and install gcc-4.6 and ensure that is what all the symlinks point to

Let you know when they can be downloaded ( I will have to test them on yet another partition first! )

regards