Hi All,
The changes to switch over to John Morris's brilliant
cross-builder docker container, are complete for machinekit
(
https://hub.docker.com/r/dovetailautomata/mk-cross-builder/)
In conjunction with the recent changes to machinekit to use
the new czmq API (John Morris, Alex Rossler and myself)
this means the following for users.
- There are now Debian Stretch packages of
machinekit for amd64, i386 and armhf
These do not require any other special packages, all
dependencies are available from the standard Debian repos.
(save a rt-preempt kernel for armhf - see below)
There are no Xenomai packages for Stretch.
The 4.x.x-rt-preempt kernels are good enough to provide a
stable servo thread on BBB or DE0-NANO-Soc
Stretch would require Xenomai3, there are none available and
machinekit would not run with them without a lot of work.
The PRU on a BBB or the FPGA on the DE0-NANO provides
hardware stepgen etc, so rt-preempt is perfectly adequate.
- There are a full set of Debian Jessie packages
for machinekit for amd64, i386 and armhf
These do require a special build version of libczmq4,
which is in the repo
They no longer require special rt-preempt kernels from
the repo or elsewhere for i386 or amd64, because Debian
have backported their Stretch kernels
Simply add the jessie-backports stanza to your apt sources
http://www.machinekit.io/docs/getting-started/install-rt-kernel-amd64/
Xenomai packages are still provided for Jessie for
backward compatibility.
Raspbian packages however are no longer specifically
provided.
This is because whilst Raspbian continues as a distro, it
uses Jessie armhf binaries.
It was hugely wasteful of time and disk space to build and
hold 2 sets of packages that were byte identical
except for the distro name.
Just change your apt sources stanza from raspbian to
jessie if you want to continue to update packages.
It does work, a user Petros tried it for us on this thread
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/machinekit/vSPXdPspyEs
All the existing packages will be retained, so if you
want, you can just do nothing.
http://www.machinekit.io/docs/getting-started/APT-packages-raspbian/
- Debian Wheezy is no longer supported or being
built for, as per the previous announcement
All support from Debian for Wheezy will cease in May 2018
anyway and it currently has absolutely minimal LTS, with
no updates or backports.
Machinekit would not now work unless a special backport of
the czmq library were made and given its life expectancy,
that would be unproductive.
All the existing packages will be retained, there will
just not be any updates.
Important re armhf:
There were difficulties in upgrading on armhf in the
initial packages - this was caused by apt running the
postrm script from the old package after
the new package was installed, deleting some elements.
This is now fixed but if you have an affected package
already installed on armhf, the upgrade may fail.
You simply need to remove it first and then re-install
packages.
sudo apt-get purge machinekit*
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install machinekit
machinekit-<flavour>
Subsequent upgrades will work as intended.
regards
