Hi there.
Like most, I have an old laptop running Windows 10 connected to my Ruida Laser. I am a Windows guy but have just starting playing with Linux on another laptop. I saw the notice about support for Lightburn on Linux and thought I wonder if it will run under Wine. Turns out it does. I installed Wine, downloaded the latest 1.7.08 Windows version of Lightburn and it works.
Yes there is an error message about WMI (every time LB is started) but I was able to start a trial version. I then released my key from my Windows pc and I could add that to this version and it activated. I have closed and restarted it a couple of times and checked it is still activated.
I saw that on another forum that is now closed that this might not work for non-networked lasers and that could be true. But this seems to work for me which is great as I want to remove Windows and install Linux on my old laptop. Hope this helps.
Just so you’re aware, support for Linux ends with Lightburn 1.7.xx. There will not be any new versions that support Linux from this point forward.
Secondly, you are allowed to have Lightburn on up to 3 computers, so no need to remove the license from one to transfer to another unless you exceed that limit. They limit the number of times you can swap the license to prevent people from taking advantage of that system.
Non networked lasers should work well too. I sometimes work with wine professionally and the serial port access works very well and reliable, just edit the entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wine\Ports and create a new entry with the COM port name e.g. “COM1” and assign it the Linux port as value e.g. “/dev/ttyUSB0”. Also ensure the user is part of the “dialout” group.
Camera use could be a greater issue with wine.
But for now I will continue to use Lightburn 1.7 with which I am quite happy. And when I see the need for a switch maybe the current Linux movement has gotten strong enough for the developer team to reconsider their stance or another solution has become available.
After all many statistics point to increasing Linux use (steam hardware surveys, and the very unreliable web statistics), countries or local governments make the switch (e.g. South Korea or Schleswig-Holstein in Germany). Still it will take PC manufacturers to sell their PCs with Linux to really make a change as the typical user is lazy. There are some which do and some who started, but the majority still sells with proprietary systems.