Errors, Errors everywhere.

Hi all,

We're getting a bit of a hobbiest CNC machine in sometime in the next week, I've been in charge of setting up a machine for it, unfortunately I've been given an old Dell Dimension 2100 and the old timer appears to have an issue with newfangled technology and all the punk tablets running on his lan.

Jokes aside, I've had quite a few errors with this, a few of them I was able to solve looking at other's threads, but I have an error that I can't seem to find a solution for. When I run LinuxCNC, the program loads, once the main window appears, it quickly crashes and gives me this error:

Hi

I've been given an old Dell Dimension 2100 and the old timer appears to have an issue with newfangled technology

First off, that is probably a PIII. You need to use the 8.04 Live CD for an install, I am surprised 10.04 even installed. You may have issues with 8.04, but it should be better.
You can upgrade to Linuxcnc 2.5.3 once you have it working

I will hold off any sort of diagnosis of the segfault which is quoted as the cause of the crash, because these are notoriously unreliable and often triggered by something completely different to that reported.

When you have 8.04 installed , first run one of the sims from the Config Picker dialog ( Sample Configurations > sim > axis > axis).
If this runs then at least you will know that a failure of your machine config is likely down to the config itself.

See how you get on

regards

I think that you're probably right, it has the 1GHz Intel Celeron "Coppermine" in it, if I'm not mistaken thats a low-end Pentium 3 isn't it?

We have tons of computers available in our lab, I'm curious if it wouldn't be better just to find a pentium 4? I'm somewhat worried that the 8.04 release might be more error-ridden than 10.04, I've already had to do a ton of fixes just to get this old Celeron to shut down properly.

You are right that a P4 would be better, but you would still be better running it on 8.04.

The Ubuntu distro number has nothing to do with the Linuxcnc version, so there is no issue there.
All Ubuntu is rubbish to my mind, but that is another matter.

The 8.04 distro had a rtai kernel compiled for a uni-processor, whereas 10.04 had one for SMP, which tends to run poorly on a uni-processor, that is the main issue.

regards

That seems to do the trick, 8.04 seems to be running fairly well other than the trouble of finding a mirror for software updates!

I got LinuxCNC 2.5 working (I think) but there might be an issue with the "Preview" window, whenever I open the preview window, black lines appear all over the screen, even outside of the LinuxCNC window. Is this to be expected? I don't seem to be getting an error.

Kris421 wrote:

I got LinuxCNC 2.5 working (I think) but there might be an issue with the "Preview" window, whenever I open the preview window, black lines appear all over the screen, even outside of the LinuxCNC window. Is this to be expected? I don't seem to be getting an error.

No, that is a classic symptom of a problem with the hardware opengl.

Installing the software libraries usually cures it.
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Troubl...oftware_based_OpenGL

regards

ArcEye wrote:

Kris421 wrote:

I got LinuxCNC 2.5 working (I think) but there might be an issue with the "Preview" window, whenever I open the preview window, black lines appear all over the screen, even outside of the LinuxCNC window. Is this to be expected? I don't seem to be getting an error.

No, that is a classic symptom of a problem with the hardware opengl.

Installing the software libraries usually cures it.
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Troubl...oftware_based_OpenGL

regards

Another way to fix this is to experiment with the several video drivers and option settings
available, and if that doesn't help, then try plugging in a PCI video card with built-in
3D support. If the video performance with software rendering is OK, then that
is fine, but it may eat up a lot of CPU time and make the keyboard slow to respond.
Avoid nVidia boards, they require proprietary drivers that sometimes cause
massive realtime hiccups.

Jon

ArcEye wrote:

Kris421 wrote:

I got LinuxCNC 2.5 working (I think) but there might be an issue with the "Preview" window, whenever I open the preview window, black lines appear all over the screen, even outside of the LinuxCNC window. Is this to be expected? I don't seem to be getting an error.

No, that is a classic symptom of a problem with the hardware opengl.

Installing the software libraries usually cures it.
wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Troubl...oftware_based_OpenGL

regards

The problem I'm having with this is finding a server with file, it seems like a lot of repositories have removed it, do you know where I could find it? perhaps?

Thanks for all the help so far though! your insight has been very useful in getting this to work

Scratch that, I was able to find it with my trusty friend Google. The 3D rendering appears to be working now!

Thanks for all the help getting this to work!