Interesting Kickstarter project.

[Boyan Silyavski]

I agree with magicniner. A cheap PC is much better. I tend to go for a Dell as even the newer ones can still come with a parallel port.

.

Had an old Dell P4 and 512Mb Ram. Windows Xp. Bought from boot sale for 20E. It was ancient when i bought it. Used it everyday on my CNc for a couple of years, no filter, no cover, no aspiration on machine. Once per year blow away the 20mm at least dust accumulated inside. Workshop inside 50 degrees C in summer, inside the Dell, who knows how much. Gave it to a friend for his machine. As i decided i need bigger monitor in the garage. So its still kicking. Meanwhile 2-3 dead expensive laptops, phones, etc. The ones that have "time fuse", when warranty expires, fuse blows

So Dell is the Name.

[Lee Roberts]

You can download a bootable CD image with Linuxcnc and you can buy a very good second hand desktop PC for £50.
I'm a massive fan of component systems where all your eggs ( Pounds Stirling ) are not in one basket ;-)

- Nick

And if you want to, you can boot from a USB stick as your hard drive giving you more towards an SSD hard drive with out the expense.

I watched this last night, if your a geek (I like to pretend I'm one) you'll enjoy it, it's the first quarter mostly as he's talking about LinuxCNC and the typical XYZ cutting machines we build, BUT he also covers other stuff that I think would be good for a few here to listen to, Linux not really being real time and so on.

Something else I want to say to people out there is, don't let the "Linux" in LinuxCNC put you off because it's not all about terminals, servers, typing commands and all the other things you would associate with "Linux"...

...what you on about yes it is, yea but only if you want to get into that side of it, once your booted up, your looking at a GUI in the same way you would be looking at Mach...if you wanted to you could also boot with a/the GUI for Linux, once booted up (like a windows machine) your looking at a traditional desktop your used to seeing, OK it's not cosmetically identical but it's the samething, so off you go using it like any other PC (Windows/Apple).

Final thoughts...
Watch the video, drop your thoughts on the associations, then go have a look at what exactly it is you'll be using with LinuxCNC because it's not geek (unless you want that).

https://youtu.be/LdJ8xjCJIGo

.Me

[Neale]

I was also a bit surprised that someone is making a fuss about having a setup utility. My copy of LinuxCNC has one anyway, and it's really not that difficult to follow. I think that there is a reasonable argument that if you don't understand enough to fill in the gaps, then you probably don't understand the machine too well. But, folks have different ideas. I come from a very technical background; it's clear from some of the questions posted in this forum that many people don't.