New Installation

Basic Installation from one of the LinuxCNC Live CDs is easier and faster than ever. You can also try out LinuxCNC without installing anything to your hard disk.

The LinuxCNC Live CD are based on Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" LTS and Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" LTS with additional packages maintained by the LinuxCNC development team.

Note: Do Not upgrade Ubuntu from 6.06 to 8.04 or upgrade from 8.04 to 8.10. The precompiled versions of LinuxCNC are only compatible with the Ubuntu version they were compiled with. Upgrading will remove the LinuxCNC packages and make your system unable to run LinuxCNC .

With this configuration, you continue to get all the benefits of Ubuntu, such as security updates and excellent community-based support for the base OS, plus support of the EMC2 components by the EMC2 team. (Ubuntu is the preferred way to use EMC2).

Updating 2.4 to 2.5

See the updating page here when updating a previous installation.

Other methods of installation

Other ways to obtain, compile, and install emc2 are discussed on the community-maintained linuxcnc wiki.

Source code

LinuxCNC is an open-source project. Currently we keep the source-code in "Git" (a versioning system) at git.linuxcnc.org. You can browse the sources online, using gitweb , or download them (instructions).

Buildbot

The Buildbot contains other packages and developer information.