Welcome to the community maintained website of the LinuxCNC Project

Notice the wiki password has changed: See BasicSteps

Table of Contents

Links Tutorials - Links to tutorials and LinuxCNC guides Videos - LinuxCNC controlled machines in action Case Studies - example machines run by LinuxCNC



Documentation LinuxCNC 2.7 Manuals: http://www.linuxcnc.org/docs/2.7/ LinuxCNC 2.6 Manuals: http://www.linuxcnc.org/docs/2.6/ LinuxCNC Manuals Page: http://www.linuxcnc.org/docs/ Authors - People working on the wiki (hint: we always need more) Contributing to formal LinuxCNC documentation: Translation Translating LinuxCNC Documentation Internationalization Translating po files used by GUIs Documentation about the LinuxCNC documentation toolchain BeyondWikiToo BasicSteps shows how to edit the wiki to add new info



TroubleShooting - what to check if something fails Hardware Problems - known hardware with problems and possible fixes Latency-test - real-time performance database FixingSMIIssues - fixing SMI issues that cause high latency StepMotorWireIdentification - Stepper Wire Identification Diagnosing Hardware - Diagnosing Hardware Problems



Why won't LinuxCNC run on Windows?

LinuxCNC runs in real-time, to give smooth motion. This is critical to accuracy and machine life. Hard real-time is not available on Windows in a price range many can afford... especially those interested in using a PC-based control. LinuxCNC is intended to control machine tools. Machine tools are DANGEROUS and reliability/consistent behavior is extremely important. Compared to Windows, few viruses affect Linux. Even without consideration of viruses, Linux is far more stable. The above also apply to virtual machines (e.g., VMware or Virtual Box) and emulators. It may be possible to trick LinuxCNC to run on a virtual machine but do so at your own risk! The above notwithstanding, one can access a running LinuxCNC machine from a Windows machine, e.g., by running a Windows-based VNC client or X11 server.

(but linuxcnc in "simulator" mode works fine in virtualization products, whether the underlying hardware is Linux or another OS)

If you want to add information to this page or add a new page, follow some BasicSteps.