Greetings all. Been lurking around here for a while but all the searching I've done hasn't gotten me past a basic started point. I recently purchased an 1100M which is my first entry into oth machining as a whole as well as CNC. In general I have met with a fair amount of success but as I am a tinkerer and can never leave well enough alone I have searched out a great many ideas on how to modify my machine (many of which came from this forum). Most require some amount of changes to the software in my controller but none seem to specify how those changes are to be made. Furthermore, some of the very basic procedures that are discussed here don't seem to work on my machine. Hopefully someone can point me in the direction of a beginner's how-to on getting into the source code so I can make some of the changes others have experimented with.

If nothing else, I would very much like to have my machine boot to a desktop rather than directly into pathpilot. Left shift-alt have no apparent affect though and ctrl-alt-x to bring up a terminal, while successful, does not get me any further as /usr/bin/gnome-panel results in a does not exist type message. Any help you all could provide to get me to a desktop view, and hopefully from there into the files and folder structure to start playing around would be greatly appreciated.

For what it may be worth, my machine came with a very small controller rather than the tower that I've seen on the PCNC440 at a local maker space. I'm not sure if that difference in the controller has anything to do with the difficulties I've experienced.