On 5/11/25 06:02, Steffen Möller via Emc-developers wrote:
Hello,
At the Debian "Reunion" in Hamburg last week I ran into Roland Clobus, who is
one of the maintainers of the Debian Live images. He was very much compatible with the
idea to have one such image that boots into a real-time Kernel and features LinuxCNC. And
then he asked me if there was something like a Debian Blend that would already
accommodate LinuxCNC. Blends are lists of packages that are somehow related, so he could
auto-prepare an image of all those packages together. There is a technical limit at 4 GB
if I understood that correctly.
Does that not disappear when the last 32 bit relics are removed,
starting with grub, replacing them with 64 bit versions? The question
then becomes: What does this do to the latency?
That triggered me to add the linuxcnc-uspace binary to
https://blends.debian.org/science/tasks/engineering. Does not look too bad :-) We can
change that to the discussed "linuxcnc" package name at any time.
Now, "engineering" may be a bit wide, with all those FEM (which may be ok) and fluid
dynamics (may be superfluous, pun intended) packages coming with it. But I thought we should see
how this evolves and can come up with a separate task like "machine control" or so at any
time. But we would want all the CAD/CAM tools on it, too. Right?
Only those which are actually useful and in fact used by those of us who
write their own gcode. Could be a survey question at some future point.
What is kind of neat with any such live image is that they have an additional
install-to-hard-drive option that just copies everything from the USB-started
image rather than retrieving packages de novo from the archive. And the image
is also persistent in that changes done to it can survive reboots. My hunch was
that any such wider .iso may help with the decision making to upgrade an
existing installation. Have not tried our own .iso images, yet, so I have no
exact idea about how redundant any such offer would be. And I guess that the
LinuxCNC-.iso images are not fully redundant in their purpose to anything
offered by Debian directly. I am also uncertain if any such real-time image
would be better for LinuxCNC or Debian - I kind of guess that both would
benefit.
So, what are your thoughts?
I have several machines with wheezy installs. Up to date of course but
they are old dells with only one sata port, which precludes saving the
/home/linuxcnc/ files, needed to be able to reinstall w/o losing a code
base I've been 25 years developing. Upgrading those machines to new
motherboards running trixie will probably mean a near total replacement
of the interfaces too due to changes in bus structures.
Frankly, I wish I could have started with an rpi4b like is moving my
bigger lathe, that is working so well that had I done that version
first, there would not be any power hog 250+ watt wintel stuff at all
here. The rpi4b or a similar clone, does a good job on 10% of the power
the wintel stuff draws & that includes its 11 watt monitor!
Sitting idle, LinuxCNC controls all machine power, so if LinuxCNC isn't
running, the power draw is about 25 watts.
Best,
>Steffen
Cheers, Gene Heskett, CET.
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author, 1940)
If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.
- Louis D. Brandeis
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