Linux accepts no input after booting.

That is the latest Linuxcnc iso release, but Wheezy has been EOL for a short time, and it is beginning to show its age in lack of support for new hardware.

You may want to give the new Debian 9 based iso a try. Unfortunately it is only a Preempt-RT kernal, so latency may not be quite as good as you could get with the older RTAI one. (jitter might be 10000ns vs 5000ns, or your results might be completely different.)
www.linuxcnc.org/testing-stretch-rtpreempt/
(Don't be put off by the word testing in the url, it has been running a lot of machines for the last 6 months or so.)

Thank you, I am now downloading linuxcnc-stretch-uspace-amd64.iso 27-Oct-2018 17:57 1.2G.
Not sure if -R13 would be better, but this one and -R13 have the same date and time stamp.

They are the same. The link to the one your're down loading is simply a link to what ever is the latest one. (which right now happens to be r13)

Thanks for all the replies - it seems to all work now!
Now to figure out how to create a machine! I realise it is about 6-7 years since I set my lathe up and I probably need to upgrade it to this version as well, but I recall having to enter the parameters manually, whilst now it seems to be selecting configs, but I have not RTMd yet and it is not for this thread.
Thanks for all inputs on getting sorted!