How old of a PC still makes sense to use?

Hey,

I glanced over the list of hardware on this site listing real-time compatible gear.
While I've even seen a Pentium II in there, I kinda doubt that current Ubuntu or Debian releases will run well on that alone, much less something like LinuxCNC on top, right?

I have a few old (parts of) PCs with LPT ports, none of which are ready to go as is.
So I wonder if any of those is worth repairing.

- Duron 600 (Nice aspect is: 230W PSU. Needs most repair, though)

- Athlon XP @ 1250MHz (can't boot from USB stick, takes some effort to get around)

- AMD64, 2 GHz (without case. *maybe* fits into one of the other 2 cases... Eats more power than the other options. (still significant compared to my small Chinese CNC router))

The most obvious seeming choice would be to use the most powerful CPU (if it actually passes the real-time test).
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the older stuff is just fine, or even better with real-time for some reason (simpler, less fancy stuff on board?).
You tell me!

I got some decent results with an old P4 running linuxcnc under Slackware.

cncn00b2018 wrote: Hey,

I glanced over the list of hardware on this site listing real-time compatible gear.
While I've even seen a Pentium II in there, I kinda doubt that current Ubuntu or Debian releases will run well on that alone, much less something like LinuxCNC on top, right?

I have a few old (parts of) PCs with LPT ports, none of which are ready to go as is.
So I wonder if any of those is worth repairing.

- Duron 600 (Nice aspect is: 230W PSU. Needs most repair, though)

- Athlon XP @ 1250MHz (can't boot from USB stick, takes some effort to get around)

- AMD64, 2 GHz (without case. *maybe* fits into one of the other 2 cases... Eats more power than the other options. (still significant compared to my small Chinese CNC router))

The most obvious seeming choice would be to use the most powerful CPU (if it actually passes the real-time test).
But maybe I'm wrong, maybe the older stuff is just fine, or even better with real-time for some reason (simpler, less fancy stuff on board?).
You tell me!

I had an Athalon pc that wouldn't boot from usb or dvd only cd. It could read dvd's just not boot them which made it difficult to get the newer linuxcnc on the machine. I could have used another machine to install linuxcnc on the hard disk and swapped back into the Athalon but everything else I had was sata and this was IDE. Swapping hard disk's from one machine to another works fine I did it with a Sata drive.

I bought a coreduo on ebay for £10 and it gives very good latency scores which is ironic as I already bought a mesa because my I7 had terrible latency no matter what I tried then decided I'd rather run fusion 360 side by side with linuxcnc than dual boot.

All of them can be used for sure, so in order of appearance:
600MHz can be used with coolcnc iso (50 MB, works perfectly, but no updates)
1250Mhz can use DebianDog version of Linuxcnc (over 200 MB, again no updates or it will break )
2Ghz can run Wheezy and even Stretch but i would advise Wheezy.

Ok, as it sounds like it makes most sense to use the fastest machine, I put the 2 GHz dual core Athlon64 together.
Since the board apparently also cannot boot from USB (what the...) I burnt my last DVD I had laying around with the debian linuxCNC image.
It boots from DVD to the LinuxCNC screen where you can select some boot options, but that screen is frozen.
Any ideas what that could be?

Check the md5sum of the image before you burn it to DVD, and make sure you burn it at the lowest speed possible.