Installing from the Live CD

[TonyZLR]

Hi all,
I just joined this group today, looked around a bit, and it looks great.

I am experienced with Windows, but not Linux. I was able to boot
into Ubuntu Linux using the Live CD, and EMC appears to run fine.

My questions are these:
1) Should I be able to see my Windows NTFS hard drive data (drive C)
from Ubuntu?
2) Can I run EMC permanently from the LIVE CD without ever installing
it to the hard drive? What are the drawbacks?

3) I know other threads have talked about this, but I'm still unclear.
If I install from the Live CD to my Windows XP drive, will I destroy
my ability to boot to Windows XP. I read somewhere that Ubuntu
is installed as an application under Windows Is this true?

Thanks for the help. I need your help to get going with this.

Tony Z

[cadmonkey]

You can install as a dual boot with Windows. You'll need to edit partitions when the installer comes to that stage - this is assuming you have enough room on the hard drive(s). You don't need much space for EMC.

EMC/Ubuntu can't be run within Windows as a virtual machine as you won't be running in realtime which the real time kernel needs. You can do a virtual machine installation for a regular *nix install, but with GRUB it's just as easy to do dual-boot. You can choose which OS to boot into at startup.

You should be able to see the Windows hard drive if you mount it, but I'm not versed enough in *nix to walk you through that.

LiveCD running - not sure. The drawbacks would be you'd have to manually mount the hard drive each time to be able to get at the machine configuration.

Best idea IMHO is to just do a dual-boot install and then you can have both worlds - Ubuntu/EMC and Windows.

[cyclestart]

Hi Tony

.
1) Should I be able to see my Windows NTFS hard drive data (drive C)
from Ubuntu?

Can if you want.
Never leave a linux user alone with your pc

2) Can I run EMC permanently from the LIVE CD without ever installing
it to the hard drive? What are the drawbacks?

To run a machine ? Simple answer, no, or at least not simply.

3) I know other threads have talked about this, but I'm still unclear.
If I install from the Live CD to my Windows XP drive, will I destroy
my ability to boot to Windows XP. I read somewhere that Ubuntu
is installed as an application under Windows Is this true?

The best way to dual boot is to install linux on a second hard drive.
2 reasons;
->Less risk to the installed windows
->Reinstalling Windows (if ever needed) into an existing dual boot setup is easier with 2 disks. Windows installer is a greedy beast.
That said, I've never had a single disk dual boot fail. (so far)

If you want clarification on #! or #3 I'll try to help
jeff

[TonyZLR]

cadmonkey and cyclestart,

Thanks for your help.

I have a Dell 4400 Dimension desktop PC, and
I'm getting terrible results on the latency test - like
200,000 for the max latency! I have an older PC
collecting dust, that I'm going to try soon.

FWIW, on my Dell D610 Laptop I get 1,000,000
on the latency test! It looks like the older the better.

Having said that, I was able to get all three of
my steppers to run very smoothly (at least they sounded smooth)
using the EMC stepper config program. Using a scope,
however, there were numerous missing pulses, though.
So my HobbyCNC Pro board is working. Now I just
have to get EMC working on an appropriate PC and
I'll be good to go!

Thanks again. I'm sure I'll have more questions soon.

Tony

[cadmonkey]

The Dell 4600 and IBM Netvista A20's at work that I've had the time to run a latency test on came up with horrid numbers. I'm not sure what chipsets those machines are running but I definitely am not begging for them when they get upgraded. I have a few 2400's that I want to test though as I think I read somewhere someone was getting good results on that model.

I am running on an old PIII-650 that gets latecy numbers around 15,000. The MSI mobo running a Celeron D 2.5GHz on a Via chipset had intermittent spikes to 300,000 like the SMI issue that some of the newer chipsets experience but it wasn't that. The curbside find really turned out to be the best machine.

[TonyZLR]

Last night I ran the latency test on a older machine that I put together using
an Intel motherboard (motherboard model#D845EBG2), and a Pentium 4. I got 19000
for the latency test. So I have something I can use that's somewhat decent.

BTW, I'm running the latency test from the Live CD, since I haven't installed EMC/Linux
yet. Are the latency tests still valid?

Tony

[cadmonkey]

I haven't noticed a marked difference between the LiveCD and installed in the Latency Test on the machines I've done both on.

[TonyZLR]

OK, I tried installing Ubuntu and ran into problems.

I have a simple setup: one 5.1 Gb hard drive configured as MASTER, on my primary
IDE cable. When I get to step 4 of the install, no partitions are found.

The drive shows up in the BIOS, and I tried several things like using Windows fdisk to delete all the partitions, and then create one new one (which I set to active). I also tried
"fdisk/mbr" to put a new Windows master boot record on it. Nothing works.

Funny thing is, when I first hooked up this drive, it was configured as a slave (I had my Windows 98 installation on the master drive), and I was able to install Ubuntu on it. But
I had a boot up problem, so I decided to install again. However, not the Ubuntu installer doesn't recoginze it. I also tried Gparted from the Live CD, and that also finds no partitions.

Any thoughts?

Tony

[TonyZLR]

Hi folks,

I just wanted to share a solution to a frustrating problem I had
while trying to install Ubuntu 8.04/EMC2 from the Live CD. Hopefully,
this will save others some time and hassle.

The problem I was having was when I tried to do the install,
no hard drives or partitions were recognized at step 4 of the install.
Note that my hard drive *was* recognized by the BIOS.

I tried countless different configurations none of which worked:
- make the HD the master
- make the HD the slave.
- put HD on the secondary IDE port
- tried a different HD
- tried both HDs together(one master/ one slave)

Nothing worked.

Then in a desperate attempt, I created another Live CD with Ubuntu 6.06

Tried again - still no worky.

Then I remember reading on some forum that when you are having boot
problems, try resetting the BIOS to its factory defaults. So I tried it and
PRESTO!!! I now have Ubuntu and EMC running on my hard drive.

Hope this helps someone.

Tony