I’ve been using Windows since I got my LongMill because of wanting to use VCarve and not wanting to reboot every time I had an idea and needed VCarve. The whole time I’ve been trying to get Windows to act more like Linux especially on the command line with some success but it’s never been ideal for me.
I get so sick of Windows pushing me to sign in with a Microsoft account and other silly BS. So I decided to see if I could go the other way and run Vectric on Linux. It turned out to be pretty easy. It runs fine under WINE with it set to Windows 10 32-bit. So now I’m running Gentoo on my development/design PC and Pop!_OS on my laptop that controls the LongMill. Pop!_OS is in the Debian/Ubuntu family and the gSender ‘deb’ package installed and is working fine. So is LightBurn on Pop!_OS.
I no longer have Windows installed on anything and I am so happy to have that Microsoft monkey of my back!
Nice! I didn’t really think about using Linux on the PC that controls my LongMill, but I can definitely see there being benefits there.
Do you see much of a difference in gSender on Linux? I have an older workstation class box (it was free) for that machine - plenty of horsepower for either OS, might try a dual boot to check it out.
I just got Pop!_OS, LightBurn and gSender setup today so I haven’t had much of chance to play with it yet. There is a significant improvement in the startup time for gSender, I can tell you that much already.
I focused on getting Vectric working first. Verifying that it worked by making a test file and running it with gSender on Windows to make sure that Vectric was working okay under WINE. Then I swapped the control PC over today, so far all is good. Next I need to setup NFS for sharing files between them. Having Gentoo in the mix without a full desktop package is slowing me down a bit but I like setting everything up just so on my dev/design machine. I took the easy route with the laptop though.
I didn’t do anything special to get it ‘working’ besides setting Wine to Windows 10, 32-bit. I’m not very experienced with Wine so I used Q4Wine to set it up. It seemed to work, so I excitedly posted about it, but then I found some problems. I should have updated this thread but it was depressing and then I forgot. The layers in VCarve Desktop didn’t work and the tool path previews were messed up graphically. It made me question whether the tool paths would be reliable. I was/am using version 11.5 of Vectric, license expired for upgrades, so that might be a factor if your on 12.
I ended up dual booting Windows to use Vectric and now I’m wondering if I can make what I want to make without Vectric so I can ditch Windows for good. I have a list of software that I need to check out but if you just shelled out $600 U.S. for VCarve I’m guessing you want to use it.
I’ve been using VCarve Pro on Windows for a while now. Building a new PC and figuring it will be much faster and less expensive to run Debian instead of windows. Testing the theory in a VM and an old laptop before committing. I keep running into a kerberos (windows auth) issue that I haven’t been able to find a way around. I will reach out in the wine communities.
A note for your issue, according to WineHQ you need to install the dll “comctl32” and “vcrun2019” to fix the layers and rendering.
I like vcarve for its simplicity but I have made some cool things in freeCAD. You just have to take the time to learn it but theres a really good youtube basics video by Novaspirit Tech and a lot of other tutorials.
Thanks for the info on those DLL’s, maybe I’ll give it another shot. I have used FreeCAD before but I’m thinking that doing a v-carve in it would be difficult unless I’m missing something. The programs that I’m most interested in checking out now are f-engrave, heeksCAD/heeksCNC and the BlenderCAM addon for Blender.
As to your issue, I was not working in a VM, so maybe that’s the difference. I don’t know about Kerberos but I thought is was a only on Window’s server. The other possibility I thought of was Debian’s software tends to be older but very stable, but I wouldn’t think that jives with Kerberos being the issue.
Thanks again Ronnie!
P.S. If you end up staying with Windows I got my last copy from kinguin for cheap and never had any issues with it. It was Windows 7 Pro and it upgraded to 10 for free when 10 released.
I used f-engrave when I first started out on the cnc. It was good but I would occasionally run into an issue where it would just decide my vcarve needed a hole drilled all the way through it for no reason at all in a place there were no vectors. It was on an old windows 7 laptop so not sure if it was a compatibility glitch or software or what.
Tried wine on physical hardware too and had the same kerberos issue. Going to try to run through it again tonight and throw the terminal output into the wine subreddit. Hopefully its something dumb easy and one of those guys knows what to do.
Probably don’t need to add this for this particular post. But I’ll add it anyway.
Usual preface, I’m with PreciseBits. So while I try to only post general information take everything I say with the understanding that I have a bias.
I never ran into any of these issue the last time I ran Aspire under Wine. I did run with the dlls per the WineHQ result for Vcarve (Link). I believe it was version 12. All I did was see if it worked, opened a file and ran a preview though. I still have a lot of software that I have to run in windows so I already dual boot.
One thing that might make a difference is that setup also runs DXVK as (back when I had the time) I would game on it. In that same strain that system ran with a 3090. So there might be a link somewhere with the proprietary drivers or hardware too. In theory it shouldn’t matter as long as there’s 2gb of vRAM since the system requirements note OpenGL. Seen stranger things work though.
The Aspire result on WineHQ (Link) also was running DXVK and had some similar/different issues. However, they didn’t note installing the dlls. Maybe there’s a combination there that works? Although, they are also different versions, different drivers, and card brands. So that might be related.
If I ever get some time I’ll try it again. This is actually the 4th time it’s come up for me in the last few months.
I’ve also used Kinguin and haven’t had issues. Make sure that if you don’t want to be on a phone loop that you get the online activation versions though.
@LewisB314 I believe that you may be confusing VCarve and gSender. The Vectric site still shows a 32 bit processor as acceptable. However, gSender has been only 64 bit for quite a while now.
and then I forgot. The layers in VCarve Desktop didn’t work and the tool path previews were messed up graphically. It made me question whether the tool paths would be reliable. I was/am using version 11.5 of Vectric, license expired for upgrades, so that might be a factor if your on 12.