Linux-cnc and USB

G'Day Guy's,
                     Well it did seem I joined this forum over 10 years ago but never made a post, anyway back again and last weekend scored a free EeePC laptop also scored a free 20" monitor and as the laptop had a password protected win7 OS I put a mate OS on then looked at E-bay and found a 4 axis USB CNC controller for $30 Au.

Now when I connected the 20" monitor via firewire it did bootup with the background and the login screen while the laptop was still booting the the 20" just showed the background screen.

So on Monday next week I should see this new controller but the question of many remain but first will it work on usb?

Regards Bryan

Short answer. No it won't work as USB is not real time.
Of course linuxcnc can do almost anything so someone might come by and prove me wrong!
 

The parallel port went out with 32 bit computers over a decade ago and this board does come with a Mach 3 disk for winsucks.

I may have to setup wine on my other laptop and see if I can get that going if linux-cnc can't drive it.

RuddyCrazy wrote:

The parallel port went out with 32 bit computers over a decade ago

Yes, the parallel port is outdated, but it is possible for LinuxCNC to take over control of it in realtime, whereas this is not possible with USB. 
Your USB device basically has a complete CNC controller onboard as a workaround for this.
You can still buy new motherboards with parallel ports, if required. 

Your comment seems to suggest that there are only two possible interfaces, but LinuxCNC supports (at least)

parallel port - pin by pin
parallel port - EPP data (Mesa 7i73, Pico PPMC, Pluto servo, Pluto step)
PCI
PCIe
ISA (yes, even more obsilte than parport)
SPI
EtherCAT
Ethernet

As links to the interface hardware. 

wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?LinuxCNC_Supported_Hardware