Early Omniturn gang lathe to Linuxcnc?

gearheaded wrote:
Shouldn't the fan stay running, until I ground the MB pwr switch pins and boot the MB?

No they should not, they should turn on after you turn on the motherboard.

Well it was just me, I misread which motherboard pins were power up, and the mask is confusing, but ultimately I was simply mistaken. I was sure I checked again to be sure, but it was late...anyway, tried again yesterday morning, and it fired right up when I realized my mistake.

Now the problem is I can't get it to boot up.

Trying to install (linuxcnc-stretch-uspace-i386.iso)

I've now tried Rufus, LiveLinux USB creator, WinDisk manager, and Unetbootin-Windows to create a bootable usb drive. So far none will boot. The Bios recognizes it as a bootable drive, but when initiated, just goes to a blank screen for a moment, then back to the boot choices screen. I've tried NTSF and Fat 32 file systems, basically, I've tried every option available for each program, plus tried each usb port separately for each attempt,. I did checksum the download and it passed.

Searched the forum for any solutions and came up with only that many others seem to get frustrated as well.

AndyPugh has given up and uses a usb dvd drive...so after four hours of getting nowhere, I went and bought a usb dvd drive and burned an image onto the rw+ drive in my windows machine. The BIOS recognizes a bootable dvd, but I get the same result.

Tried burning one from my Ubuntu laptop using K3B on a rw- disk...same problem.

Anyone have any ideas?

I am not new to this stuff, been programming computers since batches of punch cards, and building Windows and Linux systems for seemingly forever, but I've run out of ideas for what I might try differently.

Maybe its the wrong distribution to be using?

Thanks

Karl

Did you go into bios and change boot options? You may have to disable the current drive.

Also disable UEFI in BIOS.

Thanks guys, in the ASRock BIOS it is not obvious at all how to disable UEFI, and in fact, you can't with any menu choices that are decipherable if you don't already know.

Anyway, when you enable CSM compatability mode, UEFI is disabled automatically, and legacy BIOS operation begins. Then the boot menu gives the option to boot to the usbdvd without being tagged UEFI.

So Linuxcnc is up and running, now time to run some tests.

Hopefully the USB stick boot will work now as well, although I guess it won't matter once I install to the SSD.

Thanks again

Hello again:

Well I had a chance to run various latency tests without very good results. I've had to leave Portland and head to the SF bay area to take care of my Dad who is dealing with a failing body at 87. So after 12 hours of driving yesterday, I have unpacked my board and plan on trying to come up with a working configuration before I head home next week.

After researching and reading probably 30 different threads on which motherboard to buy, I found the ASRock J1900M,J1900B-ITX, and the J3355B-ITX to be recommended choices. I don't need the parallel port because of the Mesa cards installed, and I wasn't as concerned about fantastically low latency because of the cards and its a servo machine, so no software stepping to worry about.

While searching away to buy a J1900M, I found the J3355 for only $58 at Newegg. I figured to give it a go because of this comment from this thread on the CNCzone forum by PCW_MESA board member. The thread is discussing various MB for a project someone is working on...

"I have both Gigabyte and ASRock J1800 and J1900s plus a ASRock J3355 and I have not noticed any significant latency
difference between them. There really are no "magic" motherboards, especially with Preempt-RT. Most Motherboards will work
but there are occasional bad ones (and Laptops are often "bad" due to power management traps that cannot be disabled)"

So I purchased the J3355B-ITX figuring if it didn't work out, it would still make a dirt cheap desktop machine for the office or something.

My initial tests without turning anything off had 2.9 million or so ns latency. After this I tried various different settings in the BIOS. With everything I can find turned off, these are the BIOS settings...

BIOS settings:

---

CPU page

---

Both fans set to full speed
Intel Speedstep = disabled
CPU C states = disabled
Intel virtualization technology = disabled
VT-d = disabled
Power Gear = sport mode

Chipset Config:

Memory set to 1.5V 4GB Patriot 1333
Onboard graphics
Shared memory 512M
Audio disabled
LAN enabled
PCIe1 link speed auto
Deep S5 disabled

Super I/O config:

Serial ports disabled
Para port disabled

ACPI config:

Everything disabled except for- ACPI HNET Table is enabled

So far I have had only one stable configuration at about 700K ns. However, I can't remember which things were on or off at the time. With everything switched disabled I can think of as listed above, the latency shot back up to 2 million ns or more any time I resize a window or open a new tab, however, the numbers are great with just bunch of tasks running such as videos and multiple glxgears.

Anyone have any suggestions or have had success with this board?

Karl