(superseeded) Linuxcnc on Linux Mint 19.3 quick and easy installation

BeagleBrainz wrote: Wonder if it's worth doing an XFCE version...............

Well, as luck would have it, i am just now testing the Mint19.3 XFCE 64bit edition on an old Lenovo ThinkPad R61e with an Intel Celeron 550 at 2GHz with 1GB of RAM, Preempt-RT, connected to a 7i92 and it does work, quite usable i might add. It is on for the last hour imaginary cutting the Punisher logo.
Just to be clear, my newish Lenovo T420S i7 can do that, it tends to loose the connection to 7i92 at random, usually in 1 to 10 minute intervals.
Now i have two laptops that can properly work with Mesa ethernet boards, i was frankly getting tired of using the above mentioned T420S and a Dell Latitude E6510 with an i5, both have freakishly terrible latency.
Later i will attempt to make an even older Dell D510 with Mint XFCE 32bit already installed, but i need to find a RTAI kernel, so this is will happen after i test some ISO's that are waiting in line.

Sorry for changing the subject on my reply. That was my first post #nooberrors.

Attached is the debug log acquired from running linuxcnc -d [inifile] from the terminal. I hope this is what you were requesting. If not,m let me know where to get it.

It is not finding the card at that address.
Are you sure you have the 7i76E set to use 10.10.10.10 IP and it is connected directly from the PC to the Mesa board, not through a router or a switch ?
Can you ping the card?
How did you set up the networking on the PC ?

Some very strange behavior going on with the routing. Below are the results from ping and ip addr show. The really strange thing is that after i ran the ping command, I launched linuxcnc again and it worked. Not sure why that happend. Maybe linux made some changes to the routing table in the background. I'm super perplexed as to why running a ping and ip addr show would all of a sudden get things to working. I probably ran those commands 10 times during the setup just checking the system out. Also I just noticed that while both ethernet ports show up when I run ip addr show, when I use the Mint GUI to check Network Connections, only the ethernet port facing the internet shows up in the window. The one facing the Mesa 7i76e card on static IP 10.10.10.2 does not show up in the GUI view. Any thought on why this might be happening? And yes, the PC is directly connected to the Mesa 7i76e on interface enp6s0. No router or switch in the path.

allen@allen-Intense-PC:~$ ping 10.10.10.10
PING 10.10.10.10 (10.10.10.10) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.217 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.195 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.156 ms
64 bytes from 10.10.10.10: icmp_seq=4 ttl=64 time=0.188 ms
^C
--- 10.10.10.10 ping statistics ---
4 packets transmitted, 4 received, 0% packet loss, time 3057ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.156/0.189/0.217/0.021 ms
allen@allen-Intense-PC:~$ ip addr show
1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN group default qlen 1000
link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
inet 127.0.0.1/8 scope host lo
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
inet6 ::1/128 scope host
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
2: enp6s0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:01:c0:13:88:50 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 10.10.10.2/24 brd 10.10.10.255 scope global enp6s0
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
3: enp0s25: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:01:c0:13:88:4f brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 192.168.1.131/24 brd 192.168.1.255 scope global dynamic noprefixroute enp0s25
valid_lft 42968sec preferred_lft 42968sec
inet6 fe80::195d:8dc2:4add:7732/64 scope link noprefixroute
valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
4: wlp4s0: <NO-CARRIER,BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state DOWN group default qlen 1000
link/ether 00:0d:f0:ad:5a:70 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
allen@allen-Intense-PC:~$

You did not answer the last question.
If you edited the network files, revert back to how it was and use this to set up the network:
forum.linuxcnc.org/27-driver-boards/3559...ethernet-mesa-boards
Do pay attention and follow the procedure exactly, otherwise you will have issues running two networks.

BeagleBrainz wrote: No worries Tommy, should go all ok.
Should have the RTAI done tomorrow morning, finished compiling the 2.9 RTAI Linuxcnc packages, qtvcp designer runs ok.

Kinda glad I've setup a local repo for the packages, saves having to wait to get packages off the net.

Wonder if it's worth doing an XFCE version...............

I did a XFCE Devuan2 and it appears to run quick but it is hard to tell as I don't have any older machines. Heck of a lot smaller as well.

Yeah XFCE desktop is less resource intensive than MATE.
Working on MATE rtai, when I have that sorted I'll try XFCE.

I just donated 50 Euro to Linux Mint foundation, in Ethereum !
They absolutely deserve it ! And they gave us permission to use it for Linuxcnc, thanks to CMorley for making that happen, and thanks to all of Linux Mint and Linuxcnc community.

Some findings of my 15 years plus of using linux as the main OS:
LinuxLite is not lite by any measure and so are some other Light distros, Linux Mint Xfce is in the same level as most of them but it is not advertised as light
The only light distro that is actually light and normally usable is Porteus, even with Mate DE it is very fast and nimble at 300 something MB ISO.
There are also Puppy Linux versions that are small and light and very usable.
Damn Small Linux is at 53MB last i checked and it is still usable, but not at the same level as Porteus.
The main usability issue with those small distros is that installing whatever is not ready made for them results in a non working system. Normal install to a hard drive is a hit-and-miss affair at best, etc etc.
Anyway you look at it, for normal users i would opt for Mint 19.3 Mate for Preempt-RT version and Mint 19.3 XFCE for RTAI version.
I have the 19.3 Xfce 64 bit running preempt-rt on an old Lenovo R61e for two days now without a single issue wired to a 7i92. That is a single core Celeron 550 at 2GHz.
And i did check the new light versions of several distros in the last few days. Mint won !
Duvian was quite sloppy on an i5 at 2.66 Ghz compared to mint xfce.

tommylight wrote: Duvian was quite sloppy on an i5 at 2.66 Ghz compared to mint xfce.

Tom, was that Devuan with XFCE or Cinnamon?

I wish I could like Mint but there is just something about it...