labview 7.1 windows 98 install

[Greg_Shipley]

Can a labview 7.1 install built on a development platform of Win 2000 be installed on a Win 98 PC? I get a message telling me Win 2000 or XP is required for the install.

Greg

[AlexxxR]

Hi Greg,

I´m sorry but Win98 is not supported by LabVIEW 7.1. The reason for this is that National Instruments decided to terminate support for Windows 98 because in late 2003 Microsoft announced it would no longer be supporting Windows 98. In early 2004, Microsoft reversed its decision. However, it was too late in the LabVIEW 7.1 development process for National Instruments to change the platforms supported.

Hope this Informations help so far.

Alex Rudolph
National Instruments CER

[Greg_Shipley]

That is a real bummer, especially since my 7.1 CD shows 9X support on the label.

Greg

[Indiana]

Hi Greg,

the offical statement you can find in LabVIEW 7.1 Upgrade Notes on side 5 captioned as "platforms supported".

This phenomen is very interesting. I do not ever seen the 9x support label on a LabVIEW 7.1 CD before. This means that windows 95 should be also supported ? -> Please attach a copy of the label of your cd.

Thx

[mskeen]

Is there a work around for this? What files would I need to copy to get a VI (in .exe format) to run on a Win98 PC? Thanks.

[m3nth]

The only readily available way around it (which is not so readily available sometimes) is to back-save to previous version that is Win98 compatible and compile in that version. If you're lucky you'll be able to back-save without screwing the whole program up but in most cases, especially with the express VI's, it's difficult if not impossible.

The real problem with the .exe not being able to run is that the .exe isn't really a standalone executable, it's just an .llb that can be loaded by the OS (rename the .exe to a .llb and you'll see LabVIEW loads it just fine). Once the OS loads the executable however, it has no idea how to execute it since LabVIEW doesn't truly compile your LabVIEW code down to standalone machine code. Instead, the OS loads the LabVIEW runtime engine to execute the code, which makes performance identical to when you're developing your program in LabVIEW.

So obviously the runtime engine is what determines whether or not you're able to execute your code on a particular OS. Your actual VI's or libraries or other external files... none of that matters if the runtime library won't run, which leaves you with the only viable option of back-saving and compiling under an older version.

After writing all of that though, I wonder if the runtime library just does a check on the OS that could be fooled with a low-level utility so it thinks it's running on a Win2k/XP box. Hmmmm..... I bet if you could get the App OS Version property in LabVIEW to return a different OS that it might work 🙂 Although of course there could be other things besides a version check that might keep it from working properly though.. Who knows 🙂

[mskeen]

I can only save back to version 7.0. I guess I needed to have a previous version of Labview installed prior to 7.0 to be able to save back before that?

[m3nth]

Well, you've discovered one of the pet peaves of virtually the entire LabVIEW community... not having an easy way to save code between various versions. For whatever incomprehensible reason, LabVIEW only supports one prior version to save to. So if you want to save from v7.1 to v6.1 you have to open v7.1, save as v7.0. Then open LabVIEW v7.0 and save as v6.1. If you don't have LabVIEW v7.0 most people resort to posting their code online and hoping someone with the right version will be kind enough to perform the conversion.

[tst]

LV 7.0 works fine on 98. There is no need to save any earlier.
If you read Alex R's response, you will see that the MS decisions were no more than 2 or 3 months apart. Like m3 said, it's possible that the 7.1 runtime will work on 98, but just not be supported. Altenbach made an analysis a few months back regarding the installer. Try reading it to see if you can cheat windows (although I doubt it).

[Dennis_Knutson]

Yeah, someone can probably save it back to an earlier version but would also have to build the executable as well. The only time I faced the problem of installing 7.x on a win98 pc, I took it as the perfect time to finally upgrade a pretty crummy OS. It took the better part of a day and some additional RAM (cheap) but it was worth it.