How to install Ni-visa on Ubuntu 12.04

[thirdeye]

Hello,

Sorry to bring up an old thread, but the iso mounts as a read only file system and I cannot edit the INSTALL file no matter what I try.  Any suggestions?

NI-VISA 5.4.1

Ubuntu 12.04

Thanks.

[yaqian]

Well, you can always copy the content of the iso (from the mounted path) to some where, then make the INSTALL file writable, edit it, and run it from the new path.

[thirdeye]

That worked.  Thanks!

[alessio31183]

ecandan, have you solved the issue?

Because I have exactly the same problem

Thanks in advance

Bye

Alessio

[tkgamble]

No. The issue was never resolved for Ubuntu 12.04. I haven't tried it

with 14.04 or newer yet, but it might work. What I wound up doing on

12.04 was installing windows 7 in a virtual box VM and running Ni-visa

from there.

[alessio31183]

but it's quite unbelivable that NI support labview on Linux system and there's no way to install the VISA driver on the most used linux platform.

Anyone can help me?

thirdeye, any suggestions?

[ahoyarun]

Hi,

Here  is how I got mine working on Linux Mint 17 Qiana (essentially Ubuntu 14.04)

• Download ISO for NI-VISA, Mine was from http://ftp.ni.com/support/softlib/visa/NI-VISA/15.0/Linux/NI-VISA-15.0.0.iso
• mount the ISO and extract the contents to a local folder. Not sure if this is needed, I did it anyway since the ISO was mounted read-only

          "sudo mkdir /mnt/iso/"

          "mount -o loop <ISO_FILE_PATH> /mnt/iso"

          "cp -R /mnt/iso/* ~/NI/"

• install "alien" to install rpm packages. " sudo apt-get install alien"
• cd ~/NI/ and execute "sudo ./INSTALL --nodeps"
• Follow through with the install. You should now have "visaconf" in your path and be able to launch it from anywhere, just type "visaconf" from your shell prompt

Now, if you are using PyVisa, which uses NI-Visa as backend, then when you create a resourcemanager, you'll get an exception saying that 64-bit python was tryinig to link to a 32-bit library (I have 64-biit Mint installed)

To fix this

• cd /usr/local/lib
• make sure you have /usr/local/vxipnp/linux/lib64/libvisa.so
• sudo rm ./libvisa.so, this is a symbolic link pointing to the 32-bit shared lib
• sudo ln -s /usr/local/vxipnp/linux/lib64/libvisa.so libvisa.so

simply give the explicity path to the 64-bit library

>>> import visa

>>> rm  = visa.ResourceManager('/usr/local/vxipnp/linux/lib64/libvisa.so')

>>> rm.list_resources()

(u'TCPIP0::112.23.5.207::inst0::INSTR', u'ASRL1::INSTR')

Hope this helps.

cheers,

Arun

[kelvinem]

Great news - after fresh install of RH6.5 64bit with appropriate 32 legacy libraries NI-VISA, NI488.2 installed and are working together.  Also, am able to seel gpib, serial, and ethernet instruments.  So far pyVisa is working well with NI-VISA.

[tkgamble]

Arun,

This info is very helpful, thanks. I had missed the bit on re-linking

the .so file to the 64 bit library. I mistakenly assumed the 64 bit libs

weren't available yet.

[ahoyarun]

Hi, I have updated my answer above - changing the symlink to the 64-bit library fixed the pyVisa problem, but invoking the visaconf stopped working. Intead, when using PyVisa, give the explicit path to the 64-bit library and you should be ok.

cheers,

Arun