First Steps with Mesa 5i25/7i77

Ok, steps might be a bit strong. Maybe more like stumbling along...

I'm working at seeing some life from the cards that recently arrived. I've tried to load a sample configuration but received an error when using the "Config Picker".

I searched online for a bit to see how I might resolve this and stubled upon a thread here that also referenced the "pet watchdog" function/command.

forum.linuxcnc.org/forum/24-hal-componen...-schematic-for-servo

This is the first reference I had seen to using the command line to test the card and was excited, but alas when I got to the "pet watchdog" line I received a similar error.

Interesting to note that the spelling is different in either case (dash vs. underscore), though I have tried both and neither seems to work.

So it would seem I'm missing something or somehow not correctly configured. This is a fresh install of LinuxCNC-2.7-wheezy. I'm using example files that I've collected from various sources (mostly posted as attachments on this forum) because I'm not entirely sure which ones are the "master" example files and where I get them from.