I am a machinist, not a Linux nerd. Please help me.

My old faithful Windows XP machine I was using to drive a parallel port stepper driver with Mach 3 gave up the ghost. It looked like the best and cheapest way to get back up and running was to get myself a fanless mini-ITX PC, and since Windows XP won't run on it, drive it with LinuxCNC.

I'm currently in day three of trying to make this work. I've figured out that I need a Linux Kernel build with both RTAI and the Intel onboard graphics module, and that a full package containing this kernel, a Linux distribution, and LinuxCNC, is not available Because Reasons.

Can someone please write up a precise set of directions for accomplishing this, which preferably involves simply downloading packages and installing them rather than spending a day building things from source on a Celeron, and once you've done that, put it up in the documentation or a wiki or a sticky post because I'm surely not the only person who just wants the most direct path to a working CNC machine.

Have you tried this ?
forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...cnc?start=140#159389

If you have and that doesn't work I can put together one with intel drivers. The only issue being that getting better than 1024x768 screen resolution can be a bit hit and miss even with the intel drivers.

What is the exact make and model of your PC or a link to the product page.

At the end of the day you may have to get into the BIOS\UEFI settings, to setup the right boot process. The best thing is you're not gunna release any smoke.

I found that thread and tried one of the images from it, it booted from USB but crashed during the process of trying to install to my hard drive. Right now I'm trying a fresh install of Mint 19.3 and trying to figure out how to make it use the kernel from this thread , but I'm coming up short on documentation from the internet of how to load up a kernel that you didn't either download from a repo or compile from source...

Motherboard/CPU is this .

Are you sure you go the right image ? There are two lots of Mint images Mine and Tommy’s.
Tommy’s will crash on installation, my images shouldn’t and if they do I’d like to work out the issue. Leave a post of the original thread where got the image from and I’ll do my best to sort it out.
As it is my images are no different to Mint installation wise as they use the same installer.

where is this image of mint installation lockated
i am interestet 2

bbsr_5a wrote:

where is this image of mint installation lockated
i am interestet 2

link is here
forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...lease-help-me#161675

hi can you confirm the md5sum of the iso
d916e093edd3f4028986d4b3dd9144ec

Analogy wrote:

Motherboard/CPU is this .

Ok that board maybe problematic with RTAI.

There was another user with that board or similar and could only boot via UEFI, no legacy or compatibility module.
From my testing when booting from UEFI via grub to a RTAI kernel only a single core is enabled.
So before you go too far it'd be interesting if you booted from this image linked here forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...cnc?start=140#159389

Open a terminal and runand make note if all cores of your cpu are seen. You may only have one of two cores available.

The RT_PREEMPT kernels are fine but there is an issue with RTAI that I'm looking into........In saying that it could be my particular test machine.

The kernel you linked to is the one I've included in the Mint images, tho actually built on a machine running Mint.

Oh BTW I'm not a Linux nerd either, I'm a general dog's body/labourer/traffic controller.