shop computer

[Yorvyk]

On Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:01:51 +0000
Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23 November 2011 16:40, Douglas Pollard <dougpol1 at verizon.net> wrote:
> > I have an old Dell computer in my workshop that I want to run Ubuntu 10.04
> > with EMC on.  I plan to use it to operate a small cnc milling machine. I had
> > another machine that I used some, but it went the way of most old things.
> > Poof!  This Dell machine's speed is 1ghtz of  and had 512 megs of ram. This
> > should be adequate I think.  I have 10.04 installed and Grub works I also
> > have Ubuntu 11.04 installed on the second drive.  If I make my program
> > choice in Grub neither program will run.  The BIOS are set to run in the
> > original Dell mode.    Do I need to make a change in the Bios to allow
> > Ubuntu to run? While I am at it i am learning some things with some of the
> > off topic posts, so they are not all bad:-) .  Thanks, Doug
> 
> You shouldn't /need/ to make any changes, no.
> 
> I'd suggest just sticking to one version at a time - it's much
> simpler. Multiple parallel installations confuse me and I am fairly
> expert at such things!
> 
> How big are its hard disks?
> 
I'm with Liam on this one.  Stick with one OS if you're only going to use it to run a CNC machine.  10.04 would be best for this.  Dell computers often have various diagnostic, and other, partitions on them that aren't needed once the machine is out of warranty.  So just tell the installer to use ALL of the disk.  There are other partitioning schemes but, this should make things easier to diagnose if there are still boot problems.
The hardware is more than adequate, I've seen lesser hardware perform this task without problems.

-- 
Yorvyk