LabVIEW on the Mac at Macworld Expo 2008

[MichaelAivaliotis]

National Instruments had a very small booth at Macworld Expo this year. They were there nonetheless and I asked them a few questions about the current state of LabVIEW on the Mac. I also wanted to find out how, and if, a current Windows user like myself could use a Mac exclusively and still manage to satisfy Windows based LabVIEW project clients. According to Mike Neil, LabVIEW product manager, you can have your cake, er… Mac and eat it too. With the use of virtual machines (vmware fusion, parallels) or bootcamp (which boots the whole machine into Windows), you can now run your windows development environment on a Mac and satisfy any Windows project requirements. Which leaves me asking myself, why am I still on a PC?

Watch the video:
http://vishots.com/2008/01/24/labview-on-the-mac-is-alive-and-well-macworld-expo-2008/

[Kevin_H]

Hey Michael,

With Parallels, VMWare, and Boot Camp, there are certainly fewer excuses to not own a Mac! 🙂

Take a look at this article as well:

Developing Data Acquisition Systems on the Mac with Virtualization Technology

It dicusses some of the testing done here with Parallels and VMWare.

Regards,

Kevin H

[Spectre_Dave]

Michael

I am forced to use a PC at work but I own Macs @ Home.  I use Parallels with XP Pro to develope in a PC environment but on my Mac. 

You do need to buy a windows or linix OS in addition to Parallels.  One caveat is to created the largest partition that you could ever want because enlarging the windows Drive is not trivial. 

[MichaelAivaliotis]

---

@VADave wrote:

One caveat is to created the largest partition that you could ever want because enlarging the windows Drive is not trivial.

---

Thanks for the tip. I hope there are others out there with even more tips and tricks. I'm getting my first Mac this year and will setup Windows one way or another on it. I will primarily be using Mac OS but the Windows functionality is required to support Windows based LabVIEW projects.

[Neil.Pate]

Sorry for jumping into this thread late.

Can anyone comment on the performance of running Windows version of LabVIEW within paralles or fusion on a new mac? I ask as it was quite nasty running LV8.5 in VMware under linux, there were a few showstopper graphical anomalies like silly animations when right clicking in a block diagram would take several seconds while it drew the expanding rectangles, and no apparent way to disable these unnecessary animations (I tried every option available!). Before anyone asks, it was a really powerful core 2 duo laptop, and the rest of the 2D acceleration was working fine within the virtual machine, it was just LV not playing nicely.

Also, does MAX work ok from within the VM?

I would love to ditch windows!

[Kevin_H]

Hey NRP,

I have tried several different configurations, and seen no real problems at all. On MacBook Pro with 2GB ram, I can run Vista inside Parallels, and have no problems at all using LabVIEW there. Also, MAX works perfectly, as I can use MAX to communicate with Real Time targets here on my local network. I have also tested out LabVIEW in XP on both Parallels and Fusion, and seen no problems at all. I would say that if you have 2GB RAM, you can allocate a GB to each, and be good to go.

Regards,

Kevin H

[Neil.Pate]

Thanks for the insight Kevin,

This isn't really related to LabVIEW, but have you managed to get multiple monitors working in either paralles or Fusion.

I have gotten used to working with three displays (two being fed from video out of my laptop, and one with a USB video adaptor), I am not sure if the MPB supports dual external video out?
It would be upsetting to go back to two or one display

That is one thing in Windows's favour, multiple monitors just work! No jumping through hoops trying to configure them (i.e. like in linux...).

[tytell]

Hi - can you provide some more details about how you got MAX (running under Parallels) to detect a remote system? 

I'm running LabView 2009 and MAX under Windows XP on Parallels 5 on a MacBook Pro.  They both run quite nicely, but they do not detect my remote system, even when I'm connected directly to it via a cross-over cable.  I have configured my virtual machine to use "bridged networking" so that it can (in principle) access the ethernet adaptor in the MacBook directly.  I then use the Windows networking configuration to set the TCP/IP properties correctly.  Windows is able to access the internet, but does not detect the remote system.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Eric

[tbob]

This thread was started in 2008.  I don't know if you will get any response from the originator.  However, instead of using a cross-over cable and direct connect, can you use a router with standard cables?  This may work better.

[tytell]

Thanks - guess I should have paid attention to the dates.  I'll start a new thread.

At least for two windows PCs communicating, cross-over vs. hub made no difference.  Haven't tried anything other than the cross-over with the virtual machine.