Hi,
Hope I put this in the right place. I am needing some help deciding what to use as a computer to run Linux and EMC. I have read where some are better than others. Anyone got any good info? Thanks Ron

Steer clear of onbaord graphics if you can, they will give you hell! Apart from that, you will probably have the most luck with an old computer, since the Linux distros tend to be old with little support for newer hardware.

Kong is right since the BDI (Brain Dead Install) are a little older. I would check with the hardware compatability list(s).
A good place to start is www.linux.org and click on hardware on the left-hand side.

Hope this helps. Also if you have any general linux questions I'd be happy to help. I may not know CAM or G-codes but I know
Linux and CAD real well.

Brian

Good question.
I just got through trying ALL the BDI's.

The most popular/widely used is the BDI 2.18/2.22 series based on Red Hat 6.2. I've got newer computers (homebuilt) particularly with Nvidia Geforce 4 TI 4400, and my older one has a Geforce DDR. Neither of these 'newer' video cards are detected worth a darn. I was stuck running 640 X 480 @ 8bit color, not usable at all. An older 16MB video card or less should be supported ok, but I didn't have any older ones to try. Red Hat 6.2 is older also, and the KDE destop is limited as well. For example, scrolling with a wheel mouse doesn't work at all.

The BDI TNG is a newer version based on Red Hat 7. The newer Red Hat brings much better hardware support, a slicker, more functional KDE destop etc.. Supposedly this was an experimental version that they gave up on and don't upgrade anymore. I had pretty decent luck with it hardware wise. EMC ran fine too, I did have some parport config probs, but I had the same problems in ANY version of EMC.

Finally there is the BDI Live versions. These are based on Morphix, which I guess is a live version of Debian. Live means that you boot from the CD and the OS loads, without copying anything to you HD. You can use the 'net, EMC etc. without ever installing it. However, it's a pain to work with since the config files are on the CD and not your HD. You have the option to install to HD. The OS is the most up to date of any of the BDI's and thus will like newer hardware the best. EMC runs fine. The biggest down side is that the OS is stripped down for size to fit on one CD. So alot of the extra apps/development tools etc... are not installed.

When using BDI Live, would it not be possible to have custom .ini files and other customized stuff on a USB-stick and copy it over from there before starting EMC?

Or even better: could the BDI Live be customized then put on a CF-card for the PC to boot from?

Esjaavik: it's always possible, but similarly you could just format the hard drive appropriately and save it all there. Even though you're not booting from the hard drive doesn't mean you can't mount it later. IMHO "live" CDs are just toys. They work well for very specialized-purpose projects (like routers) but in the end you're better off performing a proper installation. Like snaggletto describes, these CDs are tuned to work on a wide variety of platforms and sacrifice such things like the mouse scroll wheel for wider compatibility.

I'll also dispute Kong's suggestion that on-board graphics are problematic. Any graphics chipset, on-board or not, can be problematic. I personally prefer on-board graphics since it's one less card to purchase and they usually don't have the bells and whistles that cause problems. IMHO it should not be a negative consideration when searching for a viable computer.

I agree with Chagrin. The BDI's are very standardized to work with as many different combinations as possible, the programmers nightmare.
In Redhat the problem is not the hardware support itself, it's the detection of the hardware and the knowledge what to use instead to get it work or to upgrade later. It has been a mess, I now, and the 6.x distributions from DeadReat wasn't the best either. Some hardware not found by RedHat has easily been found by Mandrake. But since 7.x the installations have detected all my hardware including RAID-cards and backup units that MS-systems left outside with question marks tagged as "not working"...

Now back to the main question. The big advantage with Linux is the architecture and hardware usage. I'm hosting a web server which is a Pentium 200MHz with 128MB RAM and it serves between 10,000 and 15,000 hits each month, last week it delivered more than 80GB of data to the Internet (roadracing movies). I tried to co-host it together with a 1GHz MS-server for load balancing - after the third overload on that server I removed it.
A couple of years ago I was in a team developing a GPRS/3G-network emulator for a big Telecom company, it's still on the move and serves about 80 test centers around the globe. Guess what it's based on. A single PIII 300 or 400Mhz PC and RedHat 6.x simulating the behaviour of a complete GPRS network (well, not that hard though, just unplug the network cable ;) ).
So, I believe that if you're supposed to run a PC for CNC only, almost anything will do. I have an old PIII I think is a 300 that I will use together with my absolute favourite graphical desktop Fluxbox (http://www.fluxbox.org), very nice, easy to use, small memory footprint and any KDE or Gnome-based application will work.
I can't tell you how nice it works yet, I've just got my servo's. But, I'll be back with a report...

Regards,
Sven