A cautionary tale.

 In past days when the earth was younger groups of humns roamed the globe. And when they met they would swap stories late at night round a fire pit of horrors they had seen...

Last post we had an introduction to the DCC-Ex system. This runs on an Atduino mini computer with another module (called a motor shield) to power the track. The unit itself is quite small and both bits can be had very cheaply from Aliexpress.

The computer (the DCC brains of the outfit is underneath, and the module on top is the motor shield with the connections to the real world at the top right. 

So, next up was the connection to the throttles and ther stuff, a Laptop running the JMRI solftware. This is a free, powerful program which lets you control almost everyting on your DCC layout, from tinnkering with decoders right through to controling the layout. So out I dug a 15 year old laptop from the old elctronics collection that every household now has. It fired up and while it ran a bit hot and a bit slow, I figured that if I got rid of windows and ran a freeware Linux system It would be fine.

If you don't understand some of the terms in the following story, do not worry its perfectly normal and you can just switch off till the end.

The lunix system I shose is called Lubuntu. It is a stripped out version of Ubuntu (a well known open source version of Linux) for use on older low spec laptops. To install it you first need to download a file for the operating system and then creaty a boot USB stick to transfer it onto the target laptop. all good at this point, and I fired up the laptop. The operating system was installed overwriting the previous windows system (there is an option to run it as a trial to see if you like it but I didn't need that). I then needed to download some updates. Hmm, why is connecting to the WiFi blanked out? A 10 minute hunt reveals I need to conect my phone and turn it into a hotspot. Right, the update loads and the laptop now conncest to the WiFi. 

Next, I need to have Java to run JMRI. What version do I have loaded? Hmmm, none...15 minutes sorting how to do this and getting it sorted. Then download JMRI and extract it to install it. Hmm, how the hell do I fire it up, there doesn't seem to have an icons on the desktop. Maybe I've installed it wrong. delette and try again. Repeat 3 times. Re-read the documentation and discover I have to create my own launcher icons (WTF). Then theres configuring the USB ports. And I can't set up JMRI with DCC-Ex unless i know which port is which...

Talking to Drew today, doing this under Windows is a piece of cake. Everything just goes from A to B to C and it just works. Bastard.

So the end of the story is this.

Don't try this in Linux.

You have been warned...