Re: Wanting to load up linux

My notion with this proposed install is try it. An idle cpu is a terrible
thing to waste.;-) Did you get Dave Andersons two volume CD set while you
were at NAMES? That has everything for 5.2 that you could want. I'd use
the latest emcbin download from sourceforge. It worked great on my 5.2.

(comments mixed in.

> From: Jon Elson <jmelson@...>
>
>
>
> Tim Goldstein wrote:
>
> > There was a long discussion about a year ago about getting the real
> > time
> > extensions to work on a 486. Arnie (Anyone know what has happened to
> > him??)

<snipped>

Arne's report is in the handbook

Http://www.linuxcnc.org/handbook/part1/software/emc/486.html

Arne got busy with another software project. He promised that he'd be
back when he got a machine to run with EMC.

<snipped>

>I think Arne sent some people
> the instructions on how to do this, or posted it to the drop box.
>
> Anyway, if this machine is equivalent to a 75 MHz Pentium, that might
> not be enough CPU power to do steppers, and would be marginal
> on a servo system. Xemc might do OK, but TkEMC is borderline
> on a 100 MHz Pentium.

Misc --

I still run rt and EMC on a pr300 cyrix 6x86. The problem stuff was for
an older generation of chips. There is a way (??? Must be old timers
disease) to confirm that linux sees the proper chip definition for cyrix.

A neighbor loaded Mandrake 7.0 on a 500k hd and the ice window manager
worked fine. He had trouble getting enough of the development system on
at the same time to compile new kernels. We went to about 900k with a
second drive and it went fine.

Yes 75 khz is slow but it would run. Larger ram (64m) works for me
because it nearly eliminates any swapping. I'd use steppermod.o and a
fairly slow refresh on the tkemc window. This might show some
chamfers and filets on corners with tkbackplot that aren't really there.
And as Jon mentioned earlier, keyboard jogs would continue until the next
Tcl/Tk loop reads the keyboard bindings.

The slow pc will not cause any loss of motion capability with steppermod.o
or real servo systems because the motion stuff takes rt priority. The
worst case is that the gui will be sluggish.

Ray