On Thursday 04 August 2016 11:44:06 Thierry de Coulon wrote:
On Thursday 04 August 2016 15.25:02 Jonesy wrote:
"TDE 14.0.0" ?
I'm on TDE 14.0.4 with Slavek's Preliminary stable builds.
Yep :)
openSUSE is at "Leap 42.1" and TDE at 14.0.4, but I see no reason to
update as everything works fine here and I did not identify any
feature that justifies an update.
Long time ago (Gene may confirm) Linux users were proud to state that
their kernel was still bellow 1.0, meaning it was good and stable and
did not need to upgrade.
Well, I'm still on wheezy (debian 7.11) running a Debian
3.16.7-ckt25-2+deb8u3~bpo70+1 kernel. Because my hardware requires a
real time kernel, the other 3 machines are currently running a
3.4-9-rtai-686-pae #1 SMP PREEMPT Debian 3.4.55-4 kernel, specially
patched and built by the linuxcnc folks. The pae on those machines does
not work but they don't have that much memory anyway as it runs
everything I need in 2 gigs.
But I do update all 4 machines daily as linuxcnc is in constant
development, and I, not running a commercial machine shop where
downtime=loss of money, so I am running the development branch because I
can afford to bleed a bit it they break something. I enjoy playing the
part of a development tester.
Now, everyone has been trained to think that any piece
of software
that has not received an update in the week is probably no more
supported, insecure and maybe dangerous...
Those non linuxcnc updates I get from the wheezy repos are supposedly
security only updates, but there are several such updates a week. Or a
huge drop of fixes for tde-trinity from slavek's repo.
Other than some pretty big problems introduced in linuxcnc as they
changed the kinematics to divorce an "axis" from a "joint", which were
then arbitrarily linked in the axis display .ini and .hal files, several
of which I found and reported, one of which cost me about $30 in broken
tooling, found and fixed the next day, and a loss of speed in the one
machine that still uses software step generation that caused some
strange errors, its been an enjoyment to me that I have helped to
stabilize the next official release.
The above change was made to simplify the configuration of a robotic arm
with many joints and degrees of movement freedom. In some robotic arms,
a move of the end of the arn and its final 2 joints carrying the
gripper, aka effector, in a straight line from point a to point b may
see 5 motors all moving at the same time, but at different rates needed
to keep the effector moving in a dead straight line within a micron or
so. Or to carry a plasma torch (or a water jet cutter) to cut complex
shapes out of what ever material is being used. Or a MIG welder,
writing a message on steel or just doing a precise weld, joining as many
parts as the jig will hold at once. Limited only by the code writers
imagination. We have some tools to help us write gcode, tools I may play
with occasionally but have not used to cut metal unless I need a hole
cut of a certain size and depth. Generally, because I may have
expensive wood under the tool, I write my own gcode.
I'd still happily be running SuSE 8.2 if it
supported my hardware :)
True, but hardware does wear out and get replaced with more capable stuff
thats needs drivers to make it do the best it can. So we upgrade. And
sometimes the upgrade is a pita. I wore out the cheap small mouse on
this machine, so I go get another lookalike, only to discover that to
save batteries, it puts itself completely to sleep and must be woke up
again with a press on the buttons on the side. And that has led to some
mouse miss-fires as I wave it around to locate its curser. Thats a
PIMA, and I'd much rather put a battery in it twice as often.
To say that I am happy with tde is an understatement. Except for the no
audio after a restart problem, I have nearly zero complaints.
Thierry
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>