LabVIEW 2012 MacOS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) Compatibility

[rvest]

For IT Security reasons, I will be forced to upgrade my Mac operating systems in the near future. I currently run MacOS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) on two Mac Minis and one MacBook Pro. I will have to replace the older Mini and probably the MacBook Pro to run MacOS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). I currently run LabVIEW 2011, but just got a notice that LV 2012 will be available to us under our site-license soon. LabVIEW is a critical application for me, so I need to make sure it will work with MacOS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) after I upgrade. If not, will LV 2012 support MacOS 10.7 (Lion) if I can still get it? I know there were some compatibility issues between LV 2011 drivers and MacOS X 10.7 based on the conversion to a 64-bit kernel. Have those all been addressed? My most important instrument I/O is VISA on GPIB (using a USB-GPIB-HS) and Ethernet as the Mac Mini doesn't have any slots for DAQ cards.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

–Rob Vest

 NIST

[vinge]

LabVIEW 2011 can support OSX ML if you uncheck all the drivers which comes with the installation, you can find these drivers online. The reason is that these drivers has to be installed in 32-bit mode, which was possible to boot in on previous OSX, but is no longer possible in ML. No Idea about LabVIEW 2012, but if the if the drivers in the installation file aren't updated I guess you should be able to do the same.

[Dayna]

Hi Rob,

LabVIEW 2012 is supported up to MacOS 10.7.  This information can be found in the LabVIEW 2012 Readme file for Mac 

The compatibility issues between LabVIEW drivers and the conversion of MacOS 10.7 to 64 bit have been addressed.  Information about this can be found here: https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/compatibility/18/mac-os-x-64-bit-kernel-and-rosetta-comp... .

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Dayna P.

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[sth]

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Dayna wrote: 

LabVIEW 2012 is supported up to MacOS 10.7.  This information can be found in the LabVIEW 2012 Readme file for Mac found here: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/0A1B3DA42924DC3A86257A0F0052B09B .

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Hi Dayna,

This doesn't help much.  Why is NI behind the curve here?  There have been developer copies of Mac OS X 10.8 out for some time now.  If IT is forcing the OP to move to 10.8 you are just telling the customer he is out of luck for some indeterminate time.  Any plans for when NI will add 10.8 officially to the supported systems?  At least with the move to 10.7 last year NI gave a timetable for making the drivers 64 bit compatible.

In terms of experience, the software installs, the drivers seem to all be 64 bit compatible and everything seems to work.  I haven't found any show stoppers other than LV 2012f1 crashing upon converting some older VIs.

Apple has made very few incompatible changes from 10.7 to 10.8 so one would not expect problems with a well written piece of software.  The big crunch may come with Mac OS X 10.9 which I am betting will not support Carbon type programs and LV will cease to function.

[Dayna]

Hi sth,

Unfortunately National Instruments does not officially support LabVIEW 2012 for Mac OS X 10.8.  It's great that you've got LabVIEW 2012 to work on Mac OS X 10.8, but currently LabVIEW 2012 for Mac is only officially supported on Mac OS X 10.7.

Best Regards,

Dayna P.

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[sth]

I know that it is unsupported.  I am not that thrilled with it as you can tell.

What was the length of time between the release of Windows XP and its official support on the current release of LV?

What was the length of time between the release of Windows VISTA and its official support on the current release of LV?

What was the length of time between the release of Windows 7 and its official support on the current release of LV?

What will be the length of time between the release of Mac OS X 10.8 and its official support on the current release of LV?

I understand that NI has not devoted the resources to QA LabVIEW on Mac OS X 10.8.  I don't have to agree with this decision.   It isn't that this was difficult or unforseen.

But for the OP, I can tell you that I just this afternoon spent an hour and moved all my GPIB collection routines, set up LabVIEW 12 with GPIB and DAQmxBase and successfully took data.  I would suggest that the original poster go ahead and use LabVIEW 12 under Mountain Lion.  The downside is that every LabVIEW failure (and LV12 with patch f1 certainly crashes upon recompiling old routines) he/she can expect that NI support will blame the OS until forced to acknowledge the problem in LV.  I just went through this yesterday with an AE but can show that the bug has existed back in OS X 10.6 and LV 8.5 so it is a problem.

Yes, life is difficult for those who use LabVIEW on the Mac.

[PatJamSim]

Hello sth,

In response to your question regarding the length of time between the release of LV 2012 and support for Mac OS X 10.8, I submitted a request to R&D for information regarding the timeline of release.  Their answer may take a little time to come back, but when it does I will be sure and post it to this forum.  Please keep in mind that it is possible that the timeline for support has not yet been established.

You also mentioned dealing with an AE about what you believe to be an existing bug.  If you would like to continue to comment upon this issue, we can look further into what is causing unexpected behavior from LabVIEW.  It is not the intent of our support structure to ignore reproducible bugs.

Thank you

Patrick, AE

[PatJamSim]

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@sth wrote:

What was the length of time between the release of Windows 7 and its official support on the current release of LV?

What will be the length of time between the release of Mac OS X 10.8 and its official support on the current release of LV?

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Hello sth,

In response to the first question, Windows 7 was released October 2009.  It wasn't supported until at least LabVIEW 2009 SP1 in Feb. 2010, and according to the System Support Roadmap, it was not officially supported until LabVIEW 2010 SP1 was released May 2011.  

In response to the second question, NI Mac Support Coordination states that they support the latest 2 versions. Prior versions may still work but are not officially supported, and it is their goal to support new versions within 6 months of release, and hopefully to begin official support of 10.8 with the release of LabVIEW 2012 SP1.  Please keep in mind this is a goal for support and does not represent a set date; as such, the actual date for official support may vary.

You may already be aware of this resource, but I would like to point out the Mac OS X Users Community as a source of relevant information for users of both Apple and National Instruments products.  Also, if you are getting reproducible bugs or error messages on officially supported combinations of software and operating system, then please share them so that they can be addressed.  Thank you.

[rolfk]

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@PatJamSim wrote:

In response to the first question, Windows 7 was released October 2009.  It wasn't supported until at least LabVIEW 2009 SP1 in Feb. 2010, and according to the System Support Roadmap, it was not officially supported until LabVIEW 2010 SP1 was released May 2011.  

 

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Windows Vista support had even a longer delay, which wasn't to bad, as almost nobody really did move to Vista anyhow

On the other hand, Windows 7 is not as difficult to get even very old LabVIEW versions going. I'm running LabVIEW 5.1.1, 6.0.2, 6.1, 7.0, 7.1.1, 8.0, 8.2.1, 8.5.1, 8.6.1, 2009SP1, 2010SP1, and 2011SP1 all on Windows 7 with no issues other than that every DAQmx (and other driver) install removes any and all instances of earlier VI libraries in the older LabVIEW folders every time. I'm not really running programs using DAQmx on those older versions, for that there are dedicated machines, if the need arises, but it is handy to have those driver VIs installed in the respective LabVIEW version anyhow, in case I need to look at old projects for some reasons. So I maintain a HD with LabVIEW installation images with all the latest supported driver installed and can copy the entire folder back onto the system from there when I need to open a project in an earlier LabVIEW version that requires them.

The Mac tends to break backwards compatibility more often and more severely than Windows!