Possible to run LinuxCNC on Macintosh PowerPC G5?

Hey community,

Simple Question:
Is it possible to run LinuxCNC on Macintosh PowerPC G5?

I have the G5 as 'working machine' without use. I dont need OSX on it.
I found this project: www.mintppc.org/about and that:
wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads/

So theoretically Ubuntu should work, but how I manage to modify LinuxCNC ?

Thanks in advance!

Best regards from Austria

Matei

hamburg65 wrote:

Hey community,

Simple Question:
Is it possible to run LinuxCNC on Macintosh PowerPC G5?

I have the G5 as 'working machine' without use. I dont need OSX on it.
I found this project: www.mintppc.org/about and that:
wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerPCDownloads/

So theoretically Ubuntu should work, but how I manage to modify LinuxCNC ?

Can you get RTAI on that kernel? On a Power PC architecture? I
doubt it. If you do, how will you control a machine with it? it has
no usable ports, as far as I know. Some people have built a sim version
of LinuxCNC to run on Apple hardware, but I doubt it was worth
the trouble.

Jon

I recently acquired a USB dongle from Ecklersoft.com for a very reasonable price, which allows my intel iMac running Mac OSX 10.9.2 to control 4 stepper motors using Eckler's "rtstepper" software. It worked right out of the box with very little effort. The software runs natively on the Mac, no installation of Linux is needed. There are also builds for Windows and Linux.
Since the source code is available at:
ecklersoft.com/download.shtml and at
code.google.com/p/rtstepperemc/
it may be possible to do a build of the software for your Mac G5.

This is a stripped down build of LinuxCNC and the "tkmini" gui, that removes the real time components. They are not needed, because the USB dongle has a memory buffer that mimics the performance of a real time system. I plan to measure the performance of the product and compare it to a conventional LinuxCNC system. This product may address the problem that it is getting harder to find new motherboards with parallel port support.