A couple newbie questions about EMC

["Simon M. Arthur" <chroma-at-mindspring.com>]

I'm building a hexapod mill and want to use EMC to control it. I 
downloaded and installed the latest release of the BDI. It seems to run 
fine with the default configuration.

When I switch to hexapod control, however, the entire machine freezes up.

I'm not even sure if I'm doing this right, however, as the best 
documentation I found is at 
<URL:http://www.itl.nist.gov/div896/emaildir/emc/msg01095.html>. I 
believe that I also have to have the line
EMCMOT= minitetra.o
in the [EMCMOT] section of emc.ini. Is this correct?

In an attempt to get around this, I decided that I needed to compile my 
own code. It's taken me two days, but I finally got everything to build 
correctly. EMC and the RCS library are some of the most difficult to 
compile packages I have run across in recent years.

Some of the problems I ran across:
The links on http://www.isd.mel.nist.gov/projects/rcslib/getrcs.html are 
out of date.
The file ftp://isdftp.cme.nist.gov/pub/emc/rcslib/rcs_src.tar.gz doesn't 
include the necessary scripts to build the RCS Library.

Anyhow, I brought everything up to date, with the latest release of EMC, 
RCS, and Linux 2.2 and rtlinux. After all this, my machine still locks 
up and won't respond when I attempt to use minitetra.o. The last line 
displayed when I execute emc.run is
starting EMC MOTION PROGRAM -- minitetra.o...
Then the machine accepts no input from the keyboard or mouse. I hear no 
disk activity.

I don't really know if I compiled everything right. As near as I can 
figure, you have to make two passes to compile EMC, one for realtime, 
and one for non realtime. Am I working along the right lines with this?

I read a few snippets which suggest that the GNU Autotools may be used 
in the future to build EMC. Has there been any progress made on this front?

EMC looks like a very useful piece of software and I hope to use it on 
my hexapod someday. Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Simon Arthur