Installing LinuxCNC 2.8 on Debian 11

RJ11:

Yeah if you post waste products of the bovine community you'll be corrected, when you're actually correct people will just nod in agreement. This has been pretty much how humanity has worked since day one.

You know it's pretty disrespectful to ignore the Docs. The devs put a lot of time into writing and fine tuning them. It's amazing what you find out by actually reading the manual, you'd be surprised. Personally if an answer to a question is better described in the docs than I can do, I'll link to the docs. It's far easier to link to the docs than spend 10 - 15 minutes typing up an answer. If the docs aren't clear in a section, ask a question addressing that issue.

Apart from Bullseye being the latest stable Debian, what is the issue with using Buster for 2.8.

I think you'll find there are systems out there running Wheezy & even early Ubuntu just fine. The hackers haven't taken over there machines, the world hasn't ended or anything like that.

Distributions move on, software releases move on, there's nothing new about this, it's just the way it is. This happens no matter what the OS.

Compiling Linuxcnc is not a pain. Once you have all the deps it's easy (this is a once off task). All your doing is typing in a few commands. Obviously you've never used Slackware. hahahaha

You guys might like to try this shortcut

download and install debian 11 Bullseye from an official ISO
open a terminal
add these lines (control-shift-v will paste text into nano)

Save the file and exit

I tried this on my chromebook and it worked but I could not check that the preempt_rt kernel was installed even though I saw it downloaded. Not sure if you need to update grub to boot into preempt_rt but the last 2 Debian 11 installs I've done booted into preempt_rt without any action on my part

Note that in a week or so the linuxcnc package will migrate  into testing branch (debian 12). When this happens, change the sources b replacing unstable with testing.

I installed as mentioned in forum.linuxcnc.org/9-installing-linuxcnc...an-11?start=0#229433 . On Dell optiplex works fine, on MSI PRO 16T 10M there are big delays. Thank you.

 Apart from Bullseye being the latest stable Debian, what is the issue with using Buster for 2.8.
 

Hardware support.  I had a Dell Optiplex 790 that came with an add-in factory parallel port card.  It uses the parport_pc kernel module.  That particular card isn't supported by the 4.x kernel that comes with Debian 10.  Debian 11 has a newer kernel which supports it out of the box, 
 

Rodw's script worked well for me. Thank you!

A couple of questions though:

1.) There were the following other lines in sources.list:

deb deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main
deb-src deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main

deb deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main
deb-src deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main

I tried replacing "bullseye" with "unstable" but apt didn't like this so I just commented them out for the install. But should they be uncommented at this point? If so, should they be modified?

2.) How will I know when to change "unstable" to "testing" and then to something else like "bullseye" when the version becomes stable?

Debian is already informing me of available updates. Do I need to make changes to sources.list before installing these updates?

Thanks as always for your advice!

I changed my process and upgraded to the unstable branch by following some instructions on the Debian site
From a basic install of Debian 11 (Bullseye) make sure any lines containing cd are commented out with a #
replace any reference to bullseye, buster or stable with unstable eg: save and exit geany, then Last line is to check PREEMPT-RT kernel is running as its installed by the install
Linuxcnc should be in the menus or open a terminal and type:
If you need to update to the latest version of master, you need to install from source but there are far fewer dependencies to install.

Note I did not install the docs as thats quite time consuming and we already have a slightly earlier version of them on the system. If you want them, remove the no-docs flag to ./configure

Optionally install the dev package for mesaflash, halcompile, ethercat etc.

This moved my version of QTplasmac from 1.222.178 when I did it.Note that opening an older sim version of QTplasmac generates an error with a missing .so file for the torch simulation.
The solution is to create a new sim by selecting from the Sample Configurations

To subsequently upgrade to the latest version of linuxcnc master optionally