LinuxCNC on Intel Clear Linux

I know Tom and I feel you..... I have been working for large corporations long enough to know that everything that started as a passionate creation by totally dedicated engineers, will be transformed into a ruthless money making machine as soon as financially driven managers take over, whose interest is only the quarterly results. And when that happens, ethics are often thrown overboard and customers are fooled by sugar coated stories written by marketeers. Many good companies have been destroyed that way. But I also learned that complaining about it is not going to help and will only result in frustration and negative energy. Hence my suggestion to stop the bashing and try to make the best out of it. Sending out a reminder every now and then about how things suck doesn't hurt, but personally I don't let it prevail, as it does not help.

Ok I reread this.....

So it's not an announcement about your own work, but just a request for someone else to create the packages.

After having had linuxcnc running on Slackware (a good few years ago), Mint runs fine but paying for hosting and such just to support a couple of users wasn't worth it, Debian is the best no fuss route for x86 & RPIs. Tho personally I found the Raspbian image for the 5 a better option, but that was at the end of 2023 and due to the lack of a Linuxcnc SPI driver it was put in a drawer and now runs Octoprint. Debian runs fine and is stable, performance isn't really a big issue when using hardware step generators as the servo thread isn't that hard to dial in with the latency that's needed (mostly it just works), sometimes (depending on your etherent chip, some RT chipsets can be a PITA) ethernet can cause issues, but mostly this is a driver thing that will show up regardless of the Distro you are using . On the other hand, software step generation that always requires a base thread is another kettle of fish, and this isn't related directly to raw clock frequency.
It works,plenty of others use Debian so questions aren't an issue.
Just be prepared if other do try it and have issues you'll be "the guy" that will have to answer the questions. So that'll be via your own experience or conversing with the CL guys.

Most entry level users will want a "plug & go" solution and not have to worry about too much stuff.
The plus with Linuxcnc & Debian is that there is a live version that can be run to see what things are and whether a certain machine looks if it will be usable without installing anything.

I know bein tied to one distro is not the Linux way it is what it is.

As for you find something insulting or not, that's a you issue, you make that decision, pretty much as being offended, that's a you decision. If I was be be insulting I'd either be extremely crass or attempt a Htichenesque type of insult. (Christopher Hitchens btw)

So it's not an announcement about your own work, but just a request for someone else to create the packages.

It is the way the CL team recommends to have applications made available for their distro, by having it officially added to their collection of bundles. Please see the CL website for more information on that. 

Just be prepared if other do try it and have issues you'll be "the guy" that will have to answer the questions. So that'll be via your own experience or conversing with the CL guys.

I understand your concern, and appreciate your warning, but I think you missed the point a bit. Or perhaps I was not clear enough myself. For me this is not about introducing a new platform for LinuxCNC as an alternative to Debian or whatever. It is about curiosity to see if  LinuxCNC would in any way benefit from the advantages that CL claims to bring with their processor tuned and performance optimized distro. If it does, then that would be interesting. The same applies to those, including myself, who have been playing around with RPI, Orange Pi, Arch Linux and other flavors of hardware, operating systems, desktop Environments, LinuxCNC GUIs, etc. Without curiosity the world will never progress. True, for x86/AMD64 platforms we may be best off with Debian and I certainly believe that too, but exploring alternative ways can be interesting nevertheless. 

I know bein tied to one distro is not the Linux way it is what it is.

Well, better one Linux distro than one MS-Windows image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/tongue.png

As for you find something insulting or not, that's a you issue, you make that decision, pretty much as being offended, that's a you decision. If I was be be insulting I'd either be extremely crass or attempt a Htichenesque type of insult. (Christopher Hitchens btw)

There is certainly some truth in that statement. But communication and perception is never truly a "you issue". It is a sender, channel and receiver issue, where many factors influence how a transmitted message is being perceived. That is why emails and online posts, including here on this forum, are always a bit tricky and why many forums have a code of conduct. But I guess in this particular case it was mainly me perceiving things incorrectly, for which I apologize. As for Hitchens, a great mind, and not shy to challenge the established views and opinions. I like that   

What do Debian 12, Ubuntu 24 and Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 have in common? ... besides being all Debian, they can all have LinuxCNC installed with a single line after an update:
sudo apt install linuxcnc-uspace
So, not a single distro, but a single distro!
There is also Gento Linux that NTULINUX maintains and supports, and has also RTAI kernels for it and Debian.
Now, has anyone tried to compile LinuxCNC on CL? Maybe that already works.
I compile on every new version of normal Mint and use the created debs to quickly install on many PC's and laptops i use and test, so that also works.
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No idea where i was headed with this, had a pizza and 2 coffees and had one of the laptops with me so i was browsing the forum and doing maintenance ... been doing a lot of installs lately as i got 5 laptops (4 used and 1 new), not counting the existing ones... send help !

Hi Tom, please let me know how I can send help! More coffee and pizza, or perhaps some nice beers? image missing /media/kunena/emoticons/cool.png I actually have quite some time available, so if you are working on specific things for which you need help, just let me know.
As for Debian, yes of course it is a big plus to have an easy install method, especially after doing system upgrades. But that was not always the case. I remember the days that upgrading under Debian could also be quite a lot of work. After LinuxCNC was added to the  mainstream Debian repositories things became much easier. And I hope that once CL has added LinuxCNC to their collection of software bundles, the same easy install and update method will apply to CL as well.
To answer you question about compiling LinuxCNC on CL: yes, I tried that, but many of the dependencies were not available on CL yet, or perhaps they were available but in places that I was not aware of. So instead of wasting more time, I followed the advice from the CL team and submitted a request to have a bundle created by them, which is comparable to having Debian adding LinuxCNC to their mainstream repositories. It should result in a single command to install and update LinuxCNC without having to build things from cratch, similar to having LinuxCNC in the Debian repositories.
But again, for me it is not about creating an alternative to Debian. It is about finding out if LinuxCNC under CL can benefit from their processor optimizations and if so (which still remains to be seen), how we may benefit from that on Debian and other distros as well.

Whelp, I just enabled -O3 and LTO in the Gentoo LinuxCNC installer/image, and bumped the CPU requirement from x86-64-v2 to x86-64-v3 (now requires AVX, AVX2, BMI1, BMI2, F16C, FMA, ABM, MOVBE and XSAVE.)

RHEL 10 requires x86-64-v3 now so this updated requirement is not radical, and x86-64-v3 goes back to 2013 for Intel (starting with Haswell) and 2015 for AMD. Let's see who's faster NOW! Muahahah!