Sheetcam on a MacBook M1

[Creative25]

So it’s been quite a journey to get Sheetcam to work on my MacBook M1

If you use a virtual machine you need Windows 10
I only have windows 7

Didn’t want to waste money on windows, so I went the Linux route.

But Sheetcam doesn’t work on arm computers.

So I needed anvertual machine that can emulate an x86 machine.

So I used UTM and installed Debian on it. Then Sheetcam.
I can share files with Mac OS with a shared folder.

But I can not access the shared folder from Sheetcam.
So I have to go to the file manager and first copy the file from the shared folder to the desktop. Then it works.

Is there a way to make Sheetcam find the network with the shared folder?

[weldguy]

Wow, impressive. Wish I could help but that is over my head. Good luck, hopefully you get it dialed in the way you want.

[sheetcamCS2]

Impressive for sure.
but I'm stumped; will bump this to Les.

[Les Newell]

What happened with Win7? SheetCam should run on 7.

[Creative25]

UTM
Windows images start from Windows 10
It may be possible to install windows7 manually.
I did not try it yet.

[Creative25]

Wow, impressive. Wish I could help but that is over my head. Good luck, hopefully you get it dialed in the way you want.

It was a permissions problem.
I just changed the te shared folder to the one where my design files are wich is in the documents.

On The UTM machine I chose Spice for file sharing.

I have a Debian Linux with the Mate desktop environment.

Since it is an emulated machine.
Which is a bit slow I wanted a light installation so I did untik the Debian desktop.

Sheetcam has still an acceptable speed so I am definitely going to use it on my laptop for making quotations.

[weldguy]

Great you have it sorted out. Permission issue makes perfect sense. Thanks for posting back.

[Creative25]

Yesterday I did some tests.
I installed the arm64 version of Debian.
And run Sheetcam on qemu-user-static.
In this way start up of Debian takes about 5 seconds.
Sheetcam opens instantly. And creating a job for a butterfly takes about a second after you hit the ok button.

Needless to say I am blown away by the performance.
However installation took some time.
First I installed queuing-user etc
The :adm64 option does apparently not work with the Sheetcam installer. So I did a normal installation of Sheetcam. After this the program will not start.
So I started Sheetcam in the terminal and get a message about missing library. I installed the missing library with the :amd64 option. Next start I got a message of another missing library. So I just repeated until the program started. It must have taken about 30 minutes or so. I just wonder if there is a way to get I the libraries installed automatically.


So I am very exited about this. I guess if it works on arm version for debian then it should even work on a raspberry.

[weldguy]

Very impressive that you were able to get this to work and it sounds like for all your efforts your getting lighting speed performance without the Windows lag. Awesome.

[Creative25]

I might try to install windows7 too because of one program I need to reprogram my plc that controls my water well.

But it is very doubtful I will ever run Sheetcam on windows.
I think that would be a step backward. I use windows for about 1 hour every six months.

I am very thankful there is a Linux version of Sheetcam.

[sheetcamCS2]

@Creative25- thank you very much for sharing your Linux expertise re. sheetcam install and use, you've given those users a few choices. Well done. Admittedly, we're not doing a lot of linux new development with sheetcam right now. Whether or not future releases will continue with a linux release is tbd. I recall hearing that the original sheetcam linux release was done for a specific controller vendor, and linux release level (v18 perhaps?).