[helpmeout]

has any one ran linuxcnc from a thumb drive,and a laptop. Im thinking of trying it. I have a dell D610 with no hard drive but it boots up on a thumb drive with linux 10.04 with linuxcnc. it has a parellel port also to hookup to a breakout bd. It would make this lap top more useful..

[svenakela]

Yes, you can run the BDI install from a USB or CF card. But laptops are no-no with real-time os' because they come with a lot of hardware interrupts that kills performance.

[salzburg]

If your Dell has a Bios where you can disable Powermanagement and Hyperthreading then you have good chance of
making your laptop work with Linuxcnc.
Dell has the habit of locking the Bios on their PC's so you will have to call them to get the Password.
Also in Ubuntu you have to disable Hibernating and the Laptop going into sleep mode after a few minutes of inactivity plus
disable updates.
If your Laptop is an older one you will find that Ubuntu 8.04 works better.

[Bob La Londe]

Instal the Ubuntu / LinuxCNC iso image from the Linux CNC website on your thumb drive. Its small, fast, and is designed for testing a system.

[dmcnally]

+1 to Bob's comment. I'm in learning mode (new to CNC) and I used to run Axis in simulation mode from a thumb drive. I liked it and created a Virtualbox machine on my Linux desktop for it. Maybe someday I'll convert my mill from it's Dynapath controller to LinuxCNC.

In any event, running from a thumb drive (or Virtualbox machine) is a great way to learn.

Dave

[tommylight]

I use it on 2 systems only on USB and it works like a charm. insert and start the computer from USB like normaly and then insert another USB with at least 4 GB and start the installer. you will have a normal installation on the latter usb with everything being saved and configured as on a hdd.