Its been a few years since I have had a chance to get back into my CNC projects. Since I was rebuilding everything anyways (I took everything apart a few years ago to move to a new house). I thought I would take a 2nd look at software tools.
First I looked and the CNC controller. I was surprised, and a bit disappointing, that LinuxCNC/EMC2 is still running Ubuntu 10.04. Since they hardware I putting together doesn’t have a Windows license, looks like I will stay with EMC2.
For CAM, i am torn between a few options, I used CamBam before, but HeeksCAD (CAM plugin) sounds promising too. And I never got a chance to look at PyCAM, which I have heard good things about.
There is a nice list of CAM software here to look over http://wiki.linuxcnc.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Cam.
Me, I might give HeeksCAD another try, it was a pain in the @#!% to install a few years back. PyCAM sounds interesting, but no development in some time. Looks like they are converting to C++ (PyCAM++) but not positive on that.