This documentation is no longer maintained.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

Table of Contents

1 Installing the EMC2 software

1.1 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.

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

1.2 EMC2 Live CD

The EMC2 team now has a custom Live-CD based on Ubuntu 6.06 and 8.04 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 from www.linuxcnc.org and burn it to a CD.

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.

1.3 Other Methods

You will find information about other install methods on the following web sites.

http://www.linuxcnc.org (Home of EMC2)

http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/emcinfo.pl (User maintained Wiki EMC2 site)

1.4 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 :

1.5 Manual installing using apt commands.

The following few section will describe how to install EMC2 on Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake” 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 emc2.2" >>/etc/apt/sources.list;'
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb-src http://www.linuxcnc.org/emc2/ dapper emc2.2" >>/etc/apt/sources.list'

Then update & get EMC2.

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

This command will install the EMC2 package along with all dependencies2.

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 -

Index

Footnotes

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 back

2   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. back