Welcome to LinuxCNC.org

andypugh wrote:
Thanks for the link. I've saved 07_rtai to disk, but won't do anything with it - I'm seeing double after all the stress of dealing with the D525 and not in a fit state to go monkeying around with something as delicate as that (relatively speaking). The latency sniffer is currently 8497 ns after about half an hour of running - starting from around 6700 ns IIRC. I'll reboot and fix the hyperthreading (which I'd originally turned off as soon as I could get at the BIOS, but turned it back on for some reason - probably because of non-booting optical discs. the latter was caused by using Toast 9 instead of disk utility to burn them. Toast, all right... I'll run the machine overnight and see what the test program ends up with - on an otherwise unloaded system.

I'm very happy to leave the SMI stuff well alone, btw .

Actually, speaking of fiddly things, something that is going to cause some more head-scratching, having done so already, is the installation of the "Short-Circuit" (ouch!) touch-screen drivers.

The supplied Ubuntu make/install script is for around Ubuntu 6 or 7(I think), and since then certain things have appear to have changed in the XFree86 file system/dependency tree, causing make to fail. I'm going to need a really clear head to deal with that one.

The "manual install" is quite complex, so that isn't necessarily quite the option it might appear on the surface - and given their age the pre-compiled drivers and so forth may not work. But that's for another day.

Out of curiosity, why did you go with the path that gives out extra hassle by download Linux 10.04 and LinuxCNC separately instead of download one as a "package" on this website that installs both at the same time?

One more thing, I have quite a bit of updates for I think different things on a pop-up screen on start-up which happened after installing the wireless driver. I think it's got something to do with a package I downloaded and installed or something that was necessary to install the wireless drivers. Those updates pop-up probably not because the internet is connected where it would get these updates from because I do not remember having that updates pop-up with wired internet or LAN connected so I guess these updates are not from the internet. But correct me if I am wrong.
Should I perform the updates?

Updates are things that I'm a bit cautious about, in case the do something silly like overwrite the kernel. I have no idea about the wireless drivers since I've decided to connect the box solely via 1 Gbit ethernet cat 5 link. Having read that wireless (radio) signals can upset things where the machining is concerned. Don't take too much notice of my comments since I've only just got my toe back in the water as far as Linux is concerned.

I'm not sure why I went the long way around - I probably simply downloaded the wrong iso file from the repository, being rather dazed and confused by the hardware issues by then. Well, it sounds like a good excuse... Another good excuse is that it might have been because I was installing LinuxCNC 2.5 as opposed to EMC 2.4.

Speaking of using Linux again, the last time I had a working install that I had to tinker with - Slackware I think - the Xserver was XFree86. It seems that in the intervening years XFree86 has more or less become a dead duck, and the current operational Xserver is "xorg". Where things have really changed for me is that there is, of course, no XF86Config file that one can edit - but on the other hand, the co-called xorg.conf file is nowhere to be found on my 10.04 setup (searching using "updatedb/locate" in an xterm). I've been searching around and it seems that xorg.conf isn't much used. I need to be able to add tweaks for the touch-screen, but what I might put them in is completely opaque to me.

The build uses the old imake system; I have yet to start hacking paths in the driver's make file(s) yet to try and get it to find various dependencies. I must say I came to loathe automake/autoconf/etc., when I used them some years ago. I wonder if things have improved.

I meant to say in my previous post that I 've turned off hyperthreading and set up Kent Reed's 07_rtai per andypugh's recommendation. After this I was running the latency sniffer whilst building the aqsis renderer and installing various dev libs: the highest things got were 12656 ns and that figure remained at that value for the entire time I was thrashing the system about. That seems like a good figure to me, from what I've read - but I know next to nothing about all this at the moment.

AlexN wrote:
Xorg.conf (I am fairly sure that it is capital X, and that that matters) is now optional. If you create one, then it will be used though.