NI-VISA 16 / Linux to control Keithley 2410 SMU

[a4gb0s23]

Hi,

I have installed NI-VISA 16 and PyVISA on CentOS 7 to ultimately try to control a Keithley 2410 SMU via python. The installations of both NI-VISA 16 and PyVISA seemed to be successful but when I tried to do a quick test in a python interactive shell I see the following:

>>> import visa

>>> rm = visa.ResourceManager()

libnipalu.so failed to initialize
Perhaps you need to run updateNIDrivers
Aborted (core dumped)

Furthermore, when I tried to then update the NI drivers, as suggested, that also failed with the following error:

nikal: ERROR: Error locating kernel sources for the requested kernel version (3.10.0-514.6.1.el7.x86_64).

It was suggested on another forum that NI-VISA 16 may not work on the CentOS version I am running (1611). Could someone confirm if this is the case and, if so, provide instructions on how to cleanly uninstall NI-VISA on Linux? I cannot find any documentation whatsoever on how to uninstall N-VISA on Linux.

Thanks.

[AJost]

Your problem looks really similar to what has been posted in here http://forums.ni.com/t5/Instrument-Control-GPIB-Serial/NI-VISA-and-openSUSE-Leap-42-1/m-p/3561363

So I believe the first step should be to follow the instructions in Q2 of the FAQ section in the VISA readme and see if you can run the update afterwards.

On the other hand: if the problem only exist with the (1611) kernel version and you are able to easily switch back to an older kernel, this might less work.

for the uninstall: there should be an uninstall script on the driver iso

Andreas Jost

Applications Engineer

National Instruments