This documentation is no longer maintained. For documentation of the current version of emc2, please see http://www.linuxcnc.org/docview/html

Installing the EMC2 software

Introduction

One of the problems users often complained about EMC was installing the software itself. They were forced to get sources, and compile themselves, and try to set up a RT-patched Linux, etc. The developers of EMC2 chose to go with a standard distribution called Ubuntu1.1.

Ubuntu has been chosen, because it fits perfectly into the Open Source views of EMC2:

EMC Download Page

You will find the most recent releases of EMC2 announced on www.linuxcnc.org. The releases of EMC2 will be done in two ways (sources and binary package). The sources (described in the Developers Handbook) consist of a tarball (emc2-<version>.tar.gz), which you should download and unpack into your home directory.

This document (oriented towards the end-user) will only try to explain how to install the binary package on the Ubuntu distribution1.2.


EMC2 Live CD

The EMC2 team now has a custom Live-CD based on Ubuntu 6.06 that will let you try out EMC2 before installing, and it's also the easiest way to install Ubuntu and EMC2 together.

Just download the ISO http://linuxcnc.org/iso/emc2-ubuntu6.06-desktop-i386.iso (EU Mirror http://dsplabs.utt.ro/ juve/emc/) and burn it to a CD. (The MD5SUM of the CD is 6ee5048eb9cb424aa030dfedccc5386b)

When you boot the CD on your machine, you can see and experiment with the exact environment and EMC2 software that you will have if you choose to install it.

If you like what you see, just click the Install icon on the desktop, answer a few questions (your name, timezone, password) and the install completes in a few minutes.

This install gives you all the benefits of the community-supported Ubuntu distribution as well as being automatically configured for EMC2. As new Ubuntu updates or EMC2 releases are made, the Update manager will let you know and allow you to easily upgrade.


EMC2 install script

We also provide a simple script to install emc2 on Ubuntu for users with an existing installation of Ubuntu. It runs the commands explained in [*].

To use it you need to :


Manual installing using apt commands.

The following few section will describe how to install EMC2 using a console and apt-commands. If you know a bit about Linux and Debian-flavored distributions this might be trivial. If not, you might consider reading [*].

First add the repository to /etc/apt/sources.list:

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://www.linuxcnc.org/emc2/ dapper emc2" >>/etc/apt/sources.list;'

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb-src http://www.linuxcnc.org/emc2/ dapper emc2" >>/etc/apt/sources.list'

Or replace 'dapper' above with 'breezy' if you still use Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger.

Then update & get emc2.

$ sudo apt-get update 
$ sudo apt-get install emc2

This command will install the emc21.3 package along with all dependencies1.4.

You might get warnings that the packages are from an untrusted source (this means your computer doesn't recognize the GPG signature on the packages). To correct that issue the following commands:

$ gpg -keyserver pgpkeys.mit.edu -recv-key BC92B87F 
$ gpg -a -export BC92B87F | sudo apt-key add -



Footnotes

...Ubuntu1.1
``Ubuntu'' is an ancient African word, meaning ``humanity to others''. Ubuntu also means ``I am what I am because of who we all are''. The Ubuntu Linux distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world. You can read more about it at http://www.ubuntu.com
... distribution1.2
For information regarding other Linux variants, check the Developers Handbook or ask for help on the emc-developers mailing list http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=6744.
... emc21.3
AXIS is now part of emc2. You don't need to install emc2-axis as previously.
... dependencies1.4
The dependencies are one of the nicest thing in Debian based distributions. They assure you have everything installed that you need. In the case of emc2 it's even a RT-patched kernel, and all needed libraries.
2007-01-21