Linux-Driver Feedback

[Linuxhippy]

Hello!

I am working on an embedded linux box targeted for measuring data and presenting the stuff over the web -> acting as webserver.

We had several problems with the Linux-Version of niDAQmx-base and nivisia, I hope those can be fixed in the next version of the Linux-Driver package:

* NVISIA is based on those ugly automatic installers, which are completly useless of you do not use an RPM based distribution (common on embedded systems).

* even the C-only drivers link against libX11, libXext and liblvmesa - whats this? On many systems those libraries are not present at all - and many computers measuring do not even have a CRT.

* No error messages at all (grrr!!!): If you use e.g. daqlistdevices you do not get any error - it just does not find any devices. It seems it does load libX11 or some libraries like that at runtime - and does not print out any error messages at all - even the /tmp/blabla-error files are empty.
We use it conjunction with nivisia, no errors - never.
Not even a single line - thats not funny!!


Conclusion: We needed about 3 days to get our USB-6008 to work, with hours of studying strace-logs (shows syscalls made by application). 3 Days!! With better error messages and maybe distribution-independent packages this could have been done in 2 hourse.
The current software package looks more like a "hey buy NI stuff - we have linux support"...

Please fix this, lg Clemens Eisserer

PS: However to not only complain about issues, the idea to use usbdevfs is really great!

Message Edited by Linuxhippy on 04-11-2005 02:13 AM

Message Edited by Linuxhippy on 04-11-2005 02:14 AM

Message Edited by Linuxhippy on 04-11-2005 02:15 AM

[Linuxhippy]

* Its not possible to use the c-interface
as through JNI library with Java.
I normally created a shared-library exposing some features to the java-world, but as soon as I linked this shared-library (linking was enough, even if nothing of was used) java really crashed hard at startup.
I wasn't even able to kill it with "kill -15", I really had to terminate it hard.

I do not know exactly where this comes from, but I assume it is nut possible to load any shared libaries that link to the c-interface at runtime - I do not know wether this is threading-dependent or not.

waw - this all is just crap!

[JoshuaP]

Just out of curiosity, what Linux distribution and kernel are you using?

-Josh

[Linuxhippy]

I am using a self-made distro based on slackware.
Since the whole driver stuff isn't based on distro-specific stuff at all and there are no dependencies (only usbdevfs)

I know this is not officially supported, but with any error messages I would have been able to detect whats missing much sooner than with analysing strace-outputs.
Furthermore such configurations are quite popular on embedded systems, where you only have a flash disk and do not want to waste space with X11.

However the JNI-Problems also occur on SuSE-Linux 8.2 which is defenitivly supported!

lg Clemens