On Sunday 04 March 2007, Ed Greshko wrote: >Gene Heskett wrote: >> Its my choice and I always >> come back to the RedHat sponsored product with one exception, my >> milling machine and emc were moved to *ubuntu precisely because of the >> long term support 6.06 promised, > >Why not use CentOS then? Its supported term will be the same as that of > RHEL. Well, at the time, and I wasn't privy to the discussions in a voting capacity, we had just been hosed by the distro they were using as the base distro they were building it on, so when they went looking, the 18 months promised by 6.06, plus the ready availability of the adeos/magma kernel modules needed to run the realtime portions of emc's control program, for the kernel version in 6.06, made the choice fairly easy, a no brainer almost. Looking back, it was the best decision they could have made, by a rather lengthy row of apple trees. That has allowed the core group of coders to concentrate on the code itself instead of trying to stay ahead of the kernel churn we have in fedora, or even in debian. I expect when its forced on them they will look for another distro with long term stability, fix the code to run on that, rinse lather & repeat. This code was rather obscure 4 years ago when they embarked on the re-write of 1.0, it is now at 2.1, and there are now underway, conversions of big expensive machining centers like Mazak's to run this code as opposed to what that category million dollar machine supplies. Given motors capable of doing it, we can move 6 axis's at 200 inches per minute with near micron accuracy, doing it with a single cpu running at less than a ghz. My little benchtop toy, with only 3 axis's enabled, doesn't begin to explore what this software can do today. It doesn't have the muscle in the spindle, nor the rpms and coolant that would allow it to try. But its fun to dream about having that sort of power while you watch this little machine carve out whatever I can write the code to make it do. There are translation utils though, I can feed a text string and a font, and an output filename to one of them, and adjust the scaling factors at the head of the file & then carve a brass nameplate for the front door or mailbox. Nice wide grins if the bits are sharp & cut clean. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
