Mesa 7i96S

That would be my preference tommylight.

My friend and I have spent weeks trying to get the official Debian 10 with LinuxCNC 2.8.2 to install on 5 different desktops with no success. The network installation fails. Thing is, we did not have this problem several months ago using the exact same installation media on the exact same USB thumb drives. I have two computers currently running it but don't dare touch them for fear of buggering them up.

I've posted here and on the Debian forums but haven't been able to resolve the network issue.

jay.perez1 wrote:

That would be my preference tommylight.

My friend and I have spent weeks trying to get the official Debian 10 with LinuxCNC 2.8.2 to install on 5 different desktops with no success. The network installation fails. Thing is, we did not have this problem several months ago using the exact same installation media on the exact same USB thumb drives. I have two computers currently running it but don't dare touch them for fear of buggering them up.

I've posted here and on the Debian forums but haven't been able to resolve the network issue.

It sounds like your network NIC is not supported in the Buster kernel. You need to tell us what network card you have for us to advise.
This is  good reason to use a later version of debian but then this error finishing read is likely to bite if using Mesa hardware.
It might be possible to just install the network driver from the manufacturer's site.

JT wrote:

For anyone following along when I installed Debian 11.5 and it was so nice to erase a 2TB drive that was also plugged in to that PC... I wondered why it too forever to install.

JT

I like my 12 TB Synology NAS even more now. Its over 12 years old and I have replaced 2 drives (out of 5) in the last 2 years. It works really well with linux clients too..

Has Debian 13 solved the NIC latency?

rodw post=252238 userid=20660

It sounds like your network NIC is not supported in the Buster kernel. You need to tell us what network card you have for us to advise.
This is  good reason to use a later version of debian but then this error finishing read is likely to bite if using Mesa hardware.
It might be possible to just install the network driver from the manufacturer's site.

Thanks rodw,

After MANY attempts, using the same USB drive and media, to install the official version of LinuxCNC I managed to get past several roadblocks and have what I believe is a good installation. Even appeared to have both the wired and wireless networks working.

Sooo ... I disconnected the Ethernet cable going to my home network and plugged it into the Mesa 7i92 board. Very excited at this point !

My joy was premature.

The NIC stopped working/responding and I can no longer launch the nm-tray 'Editor' by right-clicking on the network icon in the top-right corner as I was before. (Found a post where I can use the 'sudo nmtui' command to launch it.)

Bought a new pci-e NIC from this site (www.amazon.com/dp/B08V1HG47H?psc=1&ref=p...dt_b_product_details) which stated it was Linux compatible and installed it.

As best as I can tell the new card is not recognized by the system and there are no drivers loaded for the card so I downloaded this driver (2.5G Ethernet LINUX driver r8125 for kernel up to 5.19) from the website and attempted to install them. (They also list (Linux driver for kernel 2.4.x (Support x86 and x64)) but I haven't tried it.

They provide a 'Makefile' but it fails. Got past the first fail by manually creating a new 'build' directory in the Modules folder for the drivers to be built in ?  It then fails due to a bad 'clean' command error message; make: *** No rule to make target 'clean'.  Stop. Searched for a solution and tried a variety of commands. Pretty sure things were correct on my end but still no luck.

Questions:

    Is there a easy way to get the new NIC to be recognized ?

    Should I try the other driver ?

Thanks all.
I'm trying to get a working system so we can start using JT's configuration tool but it's been months of struggling.

I hope you guys can sort me out on a confusion I'm having.

My setup:
Hardware: Rasberry Pi 4  (So it's an arm64, not an amd64; and it's a broadcom ethernet chip, not an intel one.)
Debian 11 with kernel: Linux 5.15.27-rt-v8+
linuxcnc-uspace version:  1:2.9.0~pre arm64
(This build was provided by someone in this community: thank you very much. I took it and put XFCE as the desktop instead of the LXDE it came with, plus other tweaks for, as JT put it somewhere, fixing the annoying things in Debian. ;-P  )

I am able to ping my Mesa 7i96s card with 10.10.10.10.

But, when I get to the point in the pncconf wizard to do "board discovery," I get:
"Unspecified Error with Discovery option."

I have tried upgrading this image to a Debian 12 system, both with the Linux 6.x RT kernel and by keeping the Linux 5.15.27 RT kernel.
However, in both cases the performance is enough worse (horrible in the case of 6.x) that I feel I need to get the Debian 11 system working.

I did get as far on Debian 12 as talking to my mesa board.
I was on the LinuxCNC that installed from the distro via "sudo apt install linuxcnc-uspace" I think it was 2.9
Using that: the pncconf wizard worked when querying the 7i96s board: It shows a beautiful screen giving me great confidence that board and software are happy together.

Finally, my questions on how to fix my situation:

1. To go Debian 11, if I compile mesaflash will that fix things? Or is mesaflash irrelevant to pncconf? (If compiling is the answer, am I right in assuming I just follow the directions from github: github.com/LinuxCNC/mesaflash ?)

2. Does pncconf pick up mesaflash when querying the board, or is pncconf another sub-module of LinuxCNC that I need to compile, and somehow with drivers for 7i96s? If so, does that mean I need to compile LinuxCNC for Debian 11, and if that is so, do I pull the "master" branch or the "2.9" branch or the "7i96" branch?

3. I came across someone's discussion of mesact... is this related to my problem? (The link is here: gnipsel.com/linuxcnc/mesact/install.html )

Thanks to anyone who can point me to the right yellow brick road.

Cheers.