>> The best thing is it will help Linux get out of the 'for geeks only' view that many people have.
I doubt this will be the case because its mostly geeks who are doing the CNC thing. If you have a CNC machine and you think you are not a geek - you are in denial. But a competitor to LinuxCNC in Mach4? Well as someone who takes CNC technical support calls everyday, my opinion is tainted by Mach3. Not only does the Mach3 interface remind me of three-year-olds with crayons with all of its flashy thingies and inconsistent methods, but Mach3 is full of bugs that I doubt that the developers are even aware of. I think its terrible that they charge $175 for a license without offering sufficient support. They take your money but then instruct you to fill all of your support needs through the community. I would NEVER buy a brand-new retail product from any company without having a telephone number to call them on. Why do I think they are unaware of the bugs? Because they don't have any bug reporting built into the software, and they don't have a phone to call. Some users will go through the support forums, but most of them are calling us. They used to call Keling, too - but he got sick of all the Mach3 calls so he quit publishing his phone number (although it looks like he decided to give it another try upon launching his re-brand). At least once a week we are able to fix a Mach3 issue by uninstalling and reinstalling Mach3 - often times because Mach3 quit accessing the parallel port. But most of the time the issues are just bizarre behavior, like moving over 4" in the Y approx 2 hours into a 4 hour file, and continuing like nothing happened. Very hard to witness because of the time frame, but also impossible to resolve. Most people choose Mach3 because they want to have a single box to run their CAD, CAM, & control software on, or they are just afraid of Linux. What is not obvious is that to get it to even be half-way reliable - you have to strip down Windows to bare bones operation and never run any other software on that machine - which completely defeats the purpose. In Mach3's defense - I imagine that most of its problems comes from Windows. But loading a driver that sits underneath Windows (as it was described to me) is a hack, at best - and it just sounds dirty. Will Mach4 be any better? I don't know. Are they gonna start taking phone calls? If not, then I suspect little will change in the bugs department. If they can't handle all of the bugs on Windows given all of its different hardware/software configuration possibilities, then why do they think they can pile on more by porting it to Linux and Mac? With LinuxCNC, if you make it to the live environment from the CD, then Ubuntu found all of the drivers it needs and it will install and work flawlessly. Sure it can be more difficult to configure advanced features - but that's only because it is far more flexible and powerful. LinuxCNC also does not have telephone support, but LinuxCNC does not have the sort of problems that require telephone support. So is Mach4 a new competitor to LinuxCNC - not in my opinion, not even close. >Len On 10/6/2012 6:14 PM, Jack Coats wrote: > I am a Linux and open source advocate for just about every use, but I > do see good things from there being commercial software available for > Linux too. > > > > Will LinuxCNC and Mach go head to head? Yes, for some. But I don't > see Mach taking over the machine control market on Linux, but it will > be a good tool to add to the quiver of things that run on Linux, > proving that Linux isn't 'just for geeks'. > > I spoke to a geek from Oracle that was running Oracle on Linux long > before it was 'made available' on Linux. Not releasing it for Linux > was totally a marketing decision. The developer I spoke with said he > had to change a couple of includes when he re-compiled a little, but > it was considered a 'no change' port from his perspective. (Oracle was > mainly running on SUN at the time). And it was a big deal for > 'commercial users' to get Oracle supported on Linux, giving Linux a > lot of legitimacy. I see the Mach change to just be another positive > step. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. 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