Re-installing LinuxCNC on old Intel Atom D525

I inherited an old CNC setup for a milling machine. It's a Gecko G540 driver interfaced to a Linux box running LinuxCNC with a parallel port. Recently I was trying to make some small changes to the machine, but discovered I couldn't do anything of that nature since I didn't know the admin user password, nor the root password. Everything was working fine, and the machine was configured to login automatically, so I could still get into LinuxCNC and use it.

After a few futile attempts to recover and reset the passwords though I decided to start fresh, and am now a little stuck. This is old hardware, and I'm not even sure it's 64-bit -- the processor supports 64-bit, but I'm not sure the motherboard does as when I tried to install a 64-bit version of Lubuntu it crashed, but a 32-bit version installed fine. 

Realising that LinuxCNC is not installed ontop of an OS, but as it's own complete system, I tried writing the old 10.04 images here: www.linuxcnc.org/iso/ to my USB and booting those, but they seem to be ignored and aren't showing up as boot media in the BIOS. Maybe this is the disk image writer tool I'm using (I'm just using the Rasperry Pi imager I already had installed). This worked for other images I wrote on this USB drive and on this machine, e.g. the Lubuntu images, but maybe I need to try a different imager for LinuxCNC. 

Ideally I'd like to update the hardware, but this seem non-trivial given I need the parallel port to interface with the Gecko G540 controller, and they aren't exactly shipping boxes with parallel ports these days. 

So the 2.7.14 wheezy iso worked, and with minimal changes to my old configuration files.

However, I've been trying to add a gamepad as a pendant, following these instructions: wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl? Simple_Remote_Pendant but ran into some issues because the halui components axis.N.analog do not seem to exist in 2.7. So I tried upgrading to the wheezy 2.8 release following these instructions: buildbot.linuxcnc.org/ but was ultimately unsuccessful. I had a lot of authentication issues with the wheezy related repositories, maybe because it's unsupported at this point. In any case I thought I could just side-step the whole thing by downloading the 2.8 buster iso, but I can't get those to install on this hardware.

So I'll probably go back to 2.7 on wheezy and see if I can find a work around your the gamepad setup.

I think axis.N.analog has been renamed halui.joint.N.analog in recent versions.

linuxcnc.org/docs/html/man/man1/halui.1.html

I'm running 2.7, and the issue I was getting was saying that neither the axis.N.analog, nor the joint.N.analog existed -- but the axis.N.analog values I had were axis.x.analog, axis.y.analog, etc. Maybe I should try 0, 1, and 3 instead of x, y, z.

I also didn't see mention of the "analog" in the 2.7 manual, so I assumed it was introduced later.

But looking at this now: linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/html/gui/halui.html#_halui_pin_reference

It seems like maybe I can use jog.N.analog?

Alright we're in business!

2.7 Wheezy is running great.
Using jog.0.analog, etc, instead of axis.0.analog etc also worked for the gamepad control.

Thanks for the help.