Zenbot/Gecko/LinuxCNC?

Fun fact. A few years ago we travelled around the world for a year with the kids. We were in Bangkok about a week. So we went to the upscale shopping mall, where I discovered that most of the laptops for sale were Linux machines. And therefore cheaper, of course.

jandyman wrote:

@rodw - ifconfig doesn't even show an adapter present. And on boot it complains that eth0 cannot be found.

Bear in mind Wheezy is a couple of versions behind so it is a bit like trying to get Windows XP installed on a machine designed for Windows 10 if your laptop is newer. Compatible drivers may never have been written. This is what drove me to get Linux Mint installed becasue I could not get driver support for Wheezy or Precise. After that everything worked straight out of the box. USB Wifi, Touch screen, video, it all worked plug and play.

I think your best bet for a relatively painless installation on your laptop, would be using Stretch. But I think you've already tried one of the Linuxcnc live Stretch ISOs, So I doubt this will be of much hope, but here is what I think I would try.
Install Debian Stretch (9) using Debian's Net Install ISO. With the net install I think you can choose to install the most current Preempt-RT kernel and the desktop environment of your choice. Then install Linuxcnc via Buildbot using Synaptic. I did this not long ago in a VM for testing some things and it seemed to work well. (Obviously you must install on bare hardware, because you can't run a real machine with Linuxcnc using a VM.)

Since you said that you were having networking problems when you were trying the Linuxcnc's Stretch iso that may not be a viable option.

I'm mostly providing information for information's sake at this point, since there are too many barriers and therefore I've decided to go with UCCNC.

Having said that, I seem to remember than an Ubuntu ISO at least saw my wired ethernet HW. So I think the "problem" is with the LinuxCNC ISO.

I do need wireless to work on this computer and I checked on the Toshiba site and there seem to be no wireless driver there. I probably should have checked this before I set out on this LinuxCNC investigation. But I'm not sorry for the time invested. I'm glad I learned what I learned, and if I find myself with a different set of requirements down the road, I may be back.

I thought the probing window for Axis was pretty trick. If this were part of the standard install and a few very minor tweaks were made to Axis, it would be a pretty good UI IMO. I'd recommend that for promotion of LinuxCNC. And trying Gmoccapy in a number of graphics environments to fix up the scaling problems. Some of my friend's biggest complaints about LinuxCNC had to do with the difficulty of creating UIs (as compared to UCCNC), so having the default UIs be good is all the more important. These are just my opinions of course and they are mentioned in the spirit of wanting LinuxCNC to be as successful as possible.