[bill.anderson]

I've had a problem with doing repetitive parts consistently with Mach3 and USB Smoothstepper. The parts are out of tolerance is some dimension, never the same error twice. I have my mechanical tolerances consistent and am not losing steps. I've been blaming it on the Smoothstepper, but have just found out about various bugs in different versions of Mach3. Apparently I can reinstall an older version of Mach3 in order to fix the Turn problem and then change to a later version to cure a Mill problem. So in an attempt to keep that extra step of changing Mach versions between operations I decided I need to change over to LinuxCNC and eliminate the SmoothStepper. I would like to hear of any tips or gotcha's in making the changeover. I am hoping that this will be a painless and simple changeover. I am not a Linux Guru so I am probably underestimating the effort.
Any suggestions gratefully accepted.
Thanks
Bill Anderson

[cgo]

I am not running the same machine but I do use Linuxcnc.
Linuxcnc runs in realtime on a PC unlike windows and mach3, you can download and use the setup cd or a memory card to run Linuxcnc without installing it to see if your PC is stable enough to run it.
It uses a parallel port or network cards (Mesa) but not through a usb port, at least the last time I checked.

It is very accurate and I found it easy to use and setup, not as bad as you may think.
Basic machine movement will be easy to get working. If your machine had any specialized code that was written for mach3, that will be lost.
If you do have any problems not covered in there forums already, the moderators usually can help or point you in the right direction.