Making my first pocket cut. It was a bit of work for me to figure things out to get up to this point. But I’m either seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, or that’s a train headlight coming to mow me down. Either way something is happening.
Everything is a bit of work when you use Linux lol that would take about 30 seconds in fusion 360 
good on ya though with out smart people like you we wouldn’t be where we are today.
@Paul_Shaw it would be nice if we had genuinely free software today on par with Fusion360. Someday I’m sure we will. But Fusion360 being available gratis for amateurs has pushed that day forward some now. PyCAM seems like a dead project to me. They lost the documentation a while back and no one ever bothered trying to rewrite it, or anything. Progress on FreeCAD seems to move at a glacial pace to me too. The project is 14 years old now and it is only up to version 0.17.
I still can’t get version 0.17 to build here either. I have 0.16 running pretty good now though.
I have used FreeCad daily builds for the last couple of years for a number of 3d models for 3d printing. Also a few models for some cnc projects. While some of the features of fusion 360 are not there my experience with fusion 360 is that it is too slow on any of my current hw. I have cambam running on Linux under wine and that works great for any critical cnc cam. And I use bCnc to send gcode to grbl. Again all under Linux. My experience is that Linux works much better that Windows for my needs and is not capturing all my personal usage data and sending it to Redmond:)
@Burt_Bicksler so far I have not discovered what the silver bullet setup is for me as far as G Code generation goes. I have tried a number of programs and they all work after a fashion, but none of them make me sit up and go, yes, this is what I want to use!
I am looking for native software that runs in Linux. That is not making my search any easier for me. I have heard that decent CAM software simply doesn’t exist for Linux. I have not seen anything yet that goes against that claim either. But I’m still looking.
I haven’t tried it in a while but the cam functionality in FreeCad worked for some simple tasks. And it has been I’m proved since I played with it a year or so ago. You might want to check it out using the latest daily build if you haven’t yet. I know that you are trying to build from the git pull but at least for looking at the latest updates you might want to consider the ppa for the daily build.
@Burt_Bicksler in my case I can only run locally compiled builds. That is due to the configuration of this machine. It’s complicated.
Well then that complicates your life a bit😎
@Burt_Bicksler it should get sorted out when I get a new PC. I just built FreeCAD-0.17_pre.tar.gz yesterday and it has not crashed so far. I have not tested it enough yet to be sure if it is 100% though.
Great. Generally the daily builds have been stable enough for my needs. But every once in a while there will be an issue or two. So you need to be aware of that and keep a working snapshot until you have tested a bit.
@Burt_Bicksler I installed the new build next to, but not over my old one. I have seen some error messages in the terminal, but I don’t know what they mean. A net search did not find me any useful information either. It just dug up the file on github that threw the errors. I think I got 5 results from one search? So obviously a fairly esoteric topic. Like I said, I have not delved too deeply into it all at this point. I’m looking for a directory of a bunch of video tutorials I saved so I can work through them all again. But so far I have not been able to locate those files. I know I have them someplace. Well, I had them someplace. I’m not terribly sure if I still have them, or not right now. I got so sidetracked sorting through other files that I actually forgot what I was looking for until I got your message. So thanks for reminding me. Yeah my file server is a mess.