Introduction: ArtSoft / Mach3 forum drove me here

tommylight wrote:

forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...tools-and-no-systemd

Oh wow, so someone's already made a Devuan based ISO for LinuxCNC, that's great!

tommylight wrote:

they refused Snap, so i started loving them again

Yeah, don't get me started... Snap is all about Canonical trying to become like Red Hat - or even worse: like Steam. I think all app bundling is intrinsically a bad idea, but Snap takes that bad to whole new levels. It may look seductively simple to a Linux n00b, but will only stifle their understanding of the underlying OS, file system and package management, boxing them in so tight they'll never realise what powers they actually have. More pre-packaged junk in - more zombies out.

WRT computer and interface options; I don't think I can afford to get an Ethernet Mesa card at the moment, so I might have to go with the parallel port option for now. The price difference is just too great. But I only have two machines with a parallel port to hand; a Thinkpad X61s (Core2Duo w. 4Gb RAM), and a Pentium 3 industrial SBC (866MHz, 512Mb RAM). The Thinkpad unfortunately has a very dim backlight, which makes it basically useless until I can find a way to fix this. And while the SBC is actually a pretty cool system I doubt if it has enough ooomph to run LinuxCNC?

What hardware were you using with Mach? If you had a Smooth Stepper, don't they connect to the peripherals via a couple of "parallel port" connectors? If that is the case a Mesa 7i92 should be able to directly replace it and only costs $89 (has two "parallel port" connectors and Ethernet connectivity to the PC. That is only about twice the cost of a ordinary dual parallel port PCI card and much more capable.

Unfortunately the P3 probably isn't a good choice. Not so much because Linuxcnc would be too much for it. The resource demands for Linuxcnc are rather minimal, and such PCs were being used with it 10yrs ago. The limiting factor are the OS requirements for the current Linux distributions that Linuxcnc is packaged with. I believe a P4 with 2G of ram is a reasonable minimum and a newer 64bit cpu might be required for the latest releases. But I still use plain old parallel ports on about half of the machines I'm running Linuxcnc on.

Serviceable PCs capable of running Linuxcnc can often be dumpster dived for the cost of a new HD. But laptops of any kind are rarely a good choice.

The OmioCNC came with a built in USB motion control card, which works great with Mach3 under Windows 7 x64 on a little fanless Bay Trail-M 1.91GHz Celeron N2807 (4Gb RAM, 128Gb M-SATA SSD). It's an ideal machine for my situation as it is small, fanless and runs off a DC supply. But since LinuxCNC doesn't support USB cards I have to use something else. That's why I was thinking about the Ethernet option; it does have gigabit LAN. It also has an unused Mini-PCI slot, but I don't think that's any use?

You may have problems with the baytrail chipset. I have several with j1900 or J1850 cpu and could never get them going as there is a bug with thermald that has not been resolved in the linux kernel. They shut down with spurious thermal overload faults.

Probably for a small machine, a Mesa 7i92 and a parallel port BOB.

I'd probably just bite the bullet with a Mesa 7i76e and an Odroid H2+ PC because your machine has a spindle but that would be a bigger job to get working and a bit wasted on the machine with low voltage motors and limited number of inputs required. .

This is getting a little ridiculous - three out of three systems I have to hand are unsuitable for LinuxCNC. The only other machines I have here is a Windows 7 Core2Quad desktop with 16Gb RAM and 4Tb storage which I use mainly for Blender and other graphics heavy tasks (*cough* games *cough*), courtesy of its Radeon Pro WX 4100 GPU, and a Thinkpad X230 laptop (Devuan Beowulf, with Ivy Bridge Core i7, 8Gb RAM, 500Gb SSD) which I use for everything else. I also have a box full of Raspberry Pi 3s and Zeros (no really), but they're surely no use here.

Would it ne ok to ad your sample icons to linuxcnc?

I saw from a commit on August 30 that LinuxCNC 2.9 will be switching to GTK3 and Python3, which made me think perhaps it's time get back into this. Which branch/tag should I clone to get the best preview of 2.9?