(superseeded) Linuxcnc on Linux Mint 19.3 quick and easy installation

Ok my latest Mint 19.3 should have worked with that, graphics wise, as that is the same that the Odroid uses.
From booting from USB it boots to a 1280x1024 desktop, only have it connected to an old 4:3 ratio lcd monitor via a hdmi to dvi cable.

I saw the talk about Odroid. I had no idea that would be the one for this PC. Mint 20.0 is running my machine fine now, had to install and reboot in a sequence during the install steps to make it work.

The odroid in the image name was basically for my use for when I was creating images. All that is in the that image is a extra driver for the Odroid NICs.

Anyway I wouldn't have provided a link to it a few posts ago if it wasn't suitable.

All the Odroid H2+ is is a very small form factor PC. It uses a Intel Celeron.

Personally I think a better method of putting Linuxcn on Mint 20.0 is to use the Ubuntu bionic for the packages instead of the Debian repo and my repo for the Linuxcnc & Kernel packages.
But if you're happy.

Greetings folks - I'm really hoping I'm not breaking any cardinal rules here rolling in at the end of a VERY long and drawn out conversation. Please feel to redirect me to start new - or if the moderator wants to move this to a new string... no problem of course.

Here's my story and why I'm adding in here... I have been using LinuxCNC on Debian 'Wheezy' now for a couple years. My old shop computer decides to pack it in one day - so I upgraded and actually managed to transfer the disk, adjust for the add-on parallel port Ihad to get and I was again styling.

I got this crazy idea to install VirtualBox so I could run a Windows session (there are some tools in Windows I like to use) and discovered that 'Wheezy' was just too old for VirtualBox. Scouring the Web - I found this message,.. discovered the .ISO from Beagle Brainz with Mint 19.2 and LinuxCNC preinstalled. I got busy with other things for a few months and when I came back to the shop compute - the networking in 'Wheezy' seems to have somehow stopped working.

I figured that rather than try and troubleshoot that problem - I would just move to the Mint 19.2 version... and rediscovered this string... and now see that we are at Mint 20.0 and there is (possibly?) a 19.3 with Linux preinstalled. I have been around computers for over 40 years (yes - I had a Heathkit CP/M system as my first PC). I've messed with a few different O/S's - but everything has always taken me back to Windows - so I'm really not Linux skilled.

All that background - I installed cnc-19.2.0-20200426-mate-uspace-64bit.iso in my shop computer as a dual boot - so I can still go back to the non-functional Wheezy if I need to. I configured LinuxCNC .HAL to point to the address of the add-on parallel port which allows LinuxCNC to start - but I IMMEDIATELY get two errors in the lower right corner of the screen (where I get my limit switch errors) with the messages "Linux parallel port @57392 not found" and "Linux parallel port @57376 not found".

Some googling points to the fact that maybe the LinuxCNC/Axis driver is in conflict with the Linux/Mint driver? but I am in over my head here and hoping someone with master level knowledge of Linux and LinuxCNC can point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance for all the good info you guys share and I look forward to any specific help you can provide. As for ever contributing to the knowledge in this forum... somehow - I don't see that happening... Windows - yes... Linux? not so much - but really interested.

Arden

... grep par produced no output so I ran lspci without the grep and noticed there was a reference to 'Parallel...' so I ran with ...grep Par and produced the following output:

02:00.0 Parallel controller: SUNIX Co., Ltd. Multiport serial controller (prog-if 03 [IEEE1284])

The information produced when not 'grepping' was this:

02:00.0 Parallel controller: SUNIX Co., Ltd. Multiport serial controller (prog-if 03 [IEEE1284])
Subsystem: SUNIX Co., Ltd. Multiport serial controller
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 11
I/O ports at e030
I/O ports at e020
I/O ports at e000
Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable- Count=1/32 Maskable+ 64bit+
Capabilities: [80] Express Legacy Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting

As additional information - when I shifted to the new computer with the add-on parallel port, I had to reconfigure my .HAL file like this: (commented out the original parallel port config and added a new one)

loadrt hal_parport cfg="0xe030 out 0xe020 in"
#loadrt hal_parport cfg="0 out"

Hope that's not 'oversharing' and helpful - thanks so much for the quick response!

Arden

Sadly - it IS old... and I feel it - sigh. No OS/2 stuff - but I do still have my TurboCAD for DOS floppies around here somewhere.

It's not dual parallel - however, the 'original' hal string did not work... the string as shown worked with my WHEEZY environment.