My bungled V2.6 installation - for information

I just installed a 6040 Router in addition to my Sherline 2000 mill. I'd been running Ubuntu 10.04 with LinuxCNC 2.5 quite happily with the mill using a PCI Parallel port and a controller I built using Probotix components. The old Intel D945 motherboard lacked a parallel port hence the PCI card. I bought a DQ965GF board which did have a parallel port along with a peppier processor, and (gasp) six SATA ports. Initially i was unable to access the PCI parallel port, although the built-in 0X378 worked fine. it turns out there is a parallel port toggle in the BIOS on this board which defaults to ECP which prevents the PCI board from working. Changed that to bi-directional and I was in business. Then I installed 12.04 on one of the drives in this machine. It ran fine, I did the RTAI kernel - simple installation and that ran fine too, then LinuxCNC 2.6 which ran mostly ok. i was not able to show velocity for some reason but it did drive either machine and showed the tool paths, just like 2.5 but with more numbers on the screen.

Then I installed NFS because design is done on another computer upstairs and this makes it easier to move files around. I'm unsure if this is where things went wrong, but i found that 12.04 would lock up after about 45 seconds using the RTAI kernel but run fine with the Generic. It could also have been from an update. And there had been a couple of updates. It seems possible that an update may be ok for the Generic kernel and not the RTAI.

I don't know. So i decided to reload 10.04 with its LinuxCNC 2.5. Everything worked fine, both machines, velocity display and so forth. I went to add Chromium and NFS and no joy. Last time I did this was in early 2015 before they hid the repositories for 10.04. Eventually I discovered how to reference the archived 10.04 repositories and got Chromium and NFS running just fine.

If you've read this far, you should know that I've left out some of the other stupid things I did, but in any case, I'm back in business.

I would like to suggest that having an OS with an RTAI kernel which can be updated automatically may not be a good idea - don't know for sure, but....

There will be no more updating of 10.04 so I think that is pretty safe.

Feel free to point out any fallacies in anything I've written above. When i get to it, I think I'll replay the 12.04 v2.6 installation from scratch and see if I can catch my mistake.

I didn't want to provoke a trouble-shooting assault on this screwed up installation mostly because I wanted to do it over carefully so i knew exactly what I'd done. it was strange that there is no problem with the generic 12.04 kernel, while the RTAi version locks up in a couple of minutes even if i only try running Office-Write. I suspect problem may have something to do with USB mouse and keyboard. ALAS, I threw out last pc-corded keyboard and mice 6 months ago.

security isn't an issue at our place, but NFS was the choice because I design on a SPARCstation 10 running SunOS 4.3.2, post on a pc in a windows xp instance in Vbox virtual Machine hosted in Ubuntu 16.04, Also have a Raspberry Pi (raspberrian) showing slides on big TV, western digital MyCloud, Apple Air, and a couple of other Linux Machines all running on NFS. I stuck with NFS because of the Sun. t also have a SPARCprinter hung on the SPARC10 which is then a printserver for all the B&W. Modifying, conforming and compiling a recent version of Ghostscript so I could print from the modern systems to the Sun sucked up enough time that I wasn't interested in updating the Sun in any other way. This required getting GnuC to run on SunOS4.3.2 which I think had been done previously but not often nor by anyone I could locate online. I did patch the OS up to about 2000 which I thought the 1992 software could deal with, but not any farther.

There is also a mix of static IP addresses and DHCP. Router is one which comes with Comcast and seems to keep out the bad guys completely.

I'm on a 2 month trip right now and won't get back to this until mid October when I'll try a 12.04 installation again and see if i can duplicate earlier bad experience. Thanks for the thoughts, Tom.

Jiohn