Linux installation in SuSE 10.2

[EWTech]

Has anyone been able to get LabVIEW 8 to work on SuSE 10.2? Signs of success or pointers would be welcome. I do not understand the need for LabVIEW to run such an ancient version of the Mesa libraries. The lib this is trying to use dates to 1999 or so and so far I have not had much in the way off success.

Bob Taylor

[Stephanie B]

Hi EWTech,

While that particular distribution hasn't been rigorously tested with LV 8 yet, it is in the process of undergoing this. We are also updating the following KnowledgeBase for 10.2. My guess will be that it will be "half circle" which means: The software/driver package is not certified to work with this distribution, but may work with an appropriate version of NI-KAL installed or other workarounds. Extensive user testing is recommended before deploying a system using this configuration.

What Linux distributions do National Instruments' drivers and software support?

Stephanie

[EWTech]

My biggest problem with this outlook on the part of NI is that the "Supported" distributions are extremely old. The most recent SuSE on the list dates to 2005. I have a fairly new setup and have to use a newer kernel to get adequate hardware support and the simplest way to do this is with a newer version of the same distribution. If I wanted to be a beta tester I would be running Vista right now...

When or if I get this to work on the target setup I'll keep decent notes and document it. SuSE is now as mainstream as it gets in the Linux world. I gave up on Redhat at version 5.2 and have been a happy SuSE user since.

I just wish that the documentation on the disk set actually had something to say for more current distributions other than to point us to the use of stuff I can't get without a "wayback machine".

[EWTech]

I gave up on this for a while and had to come back to it. I'm now trying with Suse 10.1. After removing the Xen nonsense and some other bits as well as making sure the thing does not have 3D acceleration set up I'm still getting the dreaded message that this install can't find the libOSMesa.so.4 anywhere and the only thing the disk installed was libLVMesaGL.so.3. Is this supposed to be correct for this setup? When or if I get LabVIEW working I'll mess with the Visa drivers and GPIB. One step at a time...

This is LabVIEW 8.0.

[Shawn B.]

EWTech,

libLVMesaGL.so.3 is the Mesa that LabVIEW needs, but it needs to be renamed/linked to libOSMesa.so.4.  I would recomend reading my comments from this thread:

http://forums.ni.com/ni/board/message?board.id=170&message.id=270987#M270987

Shawn Bohrer
National Instruments

[EWTech]

Shawn,

Many thanks, bud! That did the trick. The LabVIEW setup script threw some error messages up in the terminal initaily but seems to work. I'll build a few vi's and see what I get.

I found Suse 10.1 on one of the mirrors but not on the primary FTP site. What I'm using is the "Remastered" version with many of the patches for the older kernel. I'm looking into making the kernel source tree sane enough for the GPIB and VISA drivers to work now. Since this is the newer kernel the installer is compalining about not having the right setup. Do I need to do "make mr_proper" on the source tree to clean things up befor "make cloneconfig"?

bob@PQLDAQ11~>

[Shawn B.]

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@EWTech wrote:

 Do I need to do "make mr_proper" on the source tree to clean things up befor "make cloneconfig"?

---

I suppose you can it shouldn't hurt anything.  Besides running "make cloneconfig" you will need to also run "make modules_prepare".  Additionally you didn't mention which versions of NI-VISA and NI-488.2 you were trying to install, but I would recommend getting the latest versions from http://www.ni.com/downloads/

Oh, and if things still don't work it would help to see the error messages.

Shawn Bohrer
National Instruments

[EWTech]

Shawn,

All appears to work perfectly. I'm still testing but it acts in some cases a tad faster than under Windows. The drivers are in and I need to check it out with a chassis to see if the VISA stuff works some time next week. I'll look into GPIB then too.

Many thanks,

bob@PQLDAQ11~>

[EWTech]

Guys,

One of the things I noticed was that the current VISA driver installs what appears to be LabVIEW-rte version 8.2. I do not know what refers to. Is this an update of the underlying runtime (VM sort of thing) or is this an update to more current labview than I thought I installed? What I've done with it seems to work but I'm worried that I've messed up my installation so I can't run this thing with more complex vis than I have tried with it so far. I want to get the the eventual update as 8.5 is likely more robust than what I have and Suse 10.2 has much better driver support.

Regards,

Bob

Message Edited by EWTech on 10-01-2007 09:59 AM

[Shawn B.]

When you compile a LabVIEW VI into an executable the resulting executable will require the LabVIEW Run Time Engine to run.  The version of the RTE depends on which version of LabVIEW was used to build that application so if it was built with LabVIEW 8.2 then it will depend on the LabVIEW 8.2 RTE.  Just like LabVIEW versions you have multiple versions of the LabVIEW RTE installed at the same time.

So if you didn't already guess where I was going with this, some of the NI-VISA utilities are just LaVIEW VIs compiled executables, and they were built with LabVIEW 8.2 which is why NI-VISA installs the LabVIEW 8.2 RTE.  This is completely normal and won't affect your LabVIEW installation in any way.

Shawn Bohrer
National Instruments