So I Acquired a 64-Bit PC to Run Newest Version of LinuxCNC

A gal from church was clearing out her fleet of PCs too primitive to run Windows 11 and I told her that I needed something that was 64-bit that could run Linux. It has 32GB of RAM, and several TB of both hard disks and SSD--far in excess of what LinuxCNC needs.

It had no built-in parallel port. LinuxCNC needs a real Centronics parallel port for timing reasons. I bought a PCIe parallel port made by StarTech. LinuxCNC would not control the mill! Searching for guidance gave me only a sensation that the parallel port might have the wrong address. Supergrok saved the day. It helped me find that the built-in parallel poets are at 0x3F8. This rang a bell from when I wrote a terminate-and-stay-resident PC-DOS (stop laughing) program that intercepted data going to the parallel port and converted Epson control codes to Postscript. It was wonderfully elegant in how it allowed programs with no Postscript support to use Apple LaserWriters 

Changing one of the LinuxCNC setup files to talk to the parallel printer at 0xC010 and problem is solved.

Complicating this was that F2 (enter BIOS) and F12 (boot from somewhere besides hard disk did nothing. It turned out that unless your monitor was hooked up to a DisplayPort monitor, they did nothing except assume you wanted to reinstall Windows. So I dug up an HDMI to DisplayPort cable. (I never throw away cables that might be useful in the future. The 1Mbps Ethernet cables were obsolete.)

UPDATE: After installing LinuxCNC and all the development tools that I use (emacs, ddd) and restoring all the software i have written, i decided to install Eclipse. When I worked for Corrections, I used Eclipse for Java development and I really liked it. It is certainly more pleasant and easier to  use than emacs and ddd. But once installed, i was out of disk space. Worse; attempting to remove stuff i did not need somehow permanently locked root so I needed to reinstall.

But instead of repeating a process that had disappointed me, i decided to take advantage of having way more storage than the last desktop. This has a 250GB SSD, a 1TB hard disk and a 2TB hard disk. I put root and all the CNC software on the SSD, and home on the 2TB drive. I will never run out. The SSD still is 33% free.  The home drive has about 1.9TB free.

I had SuperGrok walk me through partitioning. I used to know mostly how to do this, at least at the /etc/fstab level. It was still nice to have a friend walk me through it.

Eclipse was sufficiently difficult before I reinstalled that i am not sure that I will try to use it. All I wanted was to load my existing Makefile and sources into it. Perhaps SuperGrok can help me 

The one reason I upgraded to the 64-bit version of linuxCNC was modern browsers. This makes using SuperGrok and reading X possible. 

UPDATE 2: And I had SuperGrok set up a daily backup of my home directory to a 1 TB hard drive not currently in use.