LinuxCNC on Raspberry Pi 5

A few message ago I mentioned a size related error as I tried to install the ISO from Rod's Google drive.

It was suggested that I use Balencia to burn it but that actually didn't work but with searched and finally found a tool that would install it. Then I moved past that I finally wound up with the combination that I wanted to my Pi 5 install. This included all kinds of tools (including those from Raspberry) and even edited the Xfce applications menus for super convenience.

But a word of caution about 'figuring out' your way around an error instead of understanding and fixing it right - once I was done installing and configuring and wanted to make a backup of my uSD card before I moved everything to my NVME I discovered that restoring the backup to a new uSD card failed with a 'too large' error no matter what I did.

I finally used a partition tool to shrink the ROOT partition and was able to both make/restore backups and move everything to my NVME, but it would have been a lot less anxiety had I just waited until ROB posted a version without that quirk.

I guess there's a lot of people that don't use Linux as a daily driver.

dd works fine on Linux for writing the images, or if you like the GUI route Ubuntu based distro have USB image writer which works fine every time.

Another thing I've noticed, which boils down to understanding things. The Linuxcnc images for the RPi are not related to the Official Raspberry Pi images and are not meant to be used as a "daily driver" OS, they are solely for running a CNC machine and maybe for those that want or need to building Linuxcnc.

So to use these images without any issues, don't assume that they have or need the same tools that the images from the Raspberry Pi foundation.

For reference this is the tool I've used for archiving images (one caveat I'm not a windows or mac user, I'm soley a Linux user):
github.com/Drewsif/PiShrink

Our image on the downloads page is already pre-shrunk, just like a well fitting pair of jeans
It does make a big difference in the image size

Sorry forgot to clarify, from sd card to archive image.

[begin_off_topic_rant]
I can't stand wearing jeans or any long pants, why they insist we wear long sleeve shirts and long pants is the Aussie summer is beyond me, then they have a big song & dance about heat stress and keeping liquids up.

Funny thing the shunters on the rail said long pants were a safety issue and dont have to.
And don't get me started on having a ruptured disc diagnosed as a pulled muscle.
[end_off_topic_rant]

On the topic of 'daily driver'...

I switched to a pure linux environment for CAD, CAM and obviously LinuxCNC for g-Code execution. Being rusty on Linux I stumbled onto Unbuntu for my desktop and the ISO from LinuxCNC for my Pi 5 leaving Xcfe in place assuming its reputation for being light.

Plenty of upside on being Linux across the board but being new on top of very different environments depending on where my chair is pointed is a little bit disorienting. LOL

I can never remember where I installed what! LOL

I have LinuxCNC 2.9.3 working on the latest Raspberry Pi OS running the new 6.12 kernel with the pre-installed RT_PREEMPT support. It was actually pretty easy. Here is what I did:

 

I cant get apt to download from buildbot because something is screwed up with the keys and deprecated key management.