Porting to SAM3X8E

Hi all
Probably some dumb questions but I have to ask:
1) Is there a port of LinuxCNC that I can load onto the Atmel SAM3X8E ARM Cortex-M3 CPU as found in the Arduino DUE?
If there is:
2) Will its operation be similar to GRBL in that you drip feed g-code lines (from a PC or thumb drive) and it does its thing?

I know that all the Linux purists are going to jump on my lungs asking "why not just put up a Linux box?"
Simple fact is that whenever I have to deal with a command prompt, things ALWAYS go wrong - since v1.0 back in 1995.
Its somewhat of a "HATE - DESPISE" relationship I have with Linux so that is not an option and in any case, the learning curve is so steep and intensive that I would not cope.

It may be that the Atmel MCU is too slow, I have looked at the PI but that has - you guessed it - a Linux OS.

The only other option I have is to brush the dust off my C programming skills and do it myself which will take forever with all the kinematic calculations.

Thanks for reading.

andypugh wrote:

No. LinuxCNC runs under Linux. (The clue is in the name
It relies on the underlying Linux OS in many, many ways. For example for file handling, memory management, access to hardware. It also has dependencies on dozens of other Linux packages.

GRBL is likely to be a much better starting point.

DARN !!!
I actually thought as much.
I was hoping that someone knew of something that would help me get there.
Sometimes "hope" just is not enough I suppose.
Time to dust off the old notes, do a lot of reading up and get on with S(teroids)GRBL.
Should be an interesting ride.
Thanks Andy - much appreciated.

If you want to play with GRBL, you should also look at TinyG which I think is superior. Not that I've used either.

I really don't think that you need to drop down onto the command line to install and configure LinuxCNC. Try installing it, you might just be be surprised.

rodw wrote:

If you want to play with GRBL, you should also look at TinyG which I think is superior. Not that I've used either.

I really don't think that you need to drop down onto the command line to install and configure LinuxCNC. Try installing it, you might just be be surprised.

Thanks rodw
I will definitely have a look at TinyG.

Its not LinuxCNC that I have a problem with, its Linux itself.
I have not come across even a single installation that is "plug and play" since I first tried in 1995 !!
Last time I tried was about a year ago when I was first looking at my project.
Yes, the OS installs directly from the downloaded image.
Then its all sorts of command line stuff to get this and that installed or configured or whatever.
And somewhere along the way, things fail, stop working properly or just freeze up the whole machine and sometimes screws the disk up that you cannot even fdisk it to re-do the partition table - and at that point I simply give up.
In the past I have spent time, up to over a month in some cases, trying to figure out what went wrong or what I did but I seem to always make it worse.
The Linux development team seem to be doing a fantastic job but they are developing the Linux operating system for use by Linux experts - or at least someone with a far better knowledge than that which I or most people have.
Get rid of this "apt get" or whatever the command is and make it a simple click and go thing and maybe more of us will convert.
Microsoft won the OS war with a vastly inferior product simply because it was easy to use and worked most of the time for totally non-technical people.

I spend far more time pounding my head on the desk trying in vain to fix MS Windows problems than I do with Linux. At least with Linux I can usually google up a solution to most of my problems.

The other really nice thing about Linux is that you can swap hard drives with installed
Linux systems freely between different PCs, try that with windows