NI Package Management Idea Exchange

Our IT department has now opened up using NI Package Manager to install LabVIEW, and is leaving it to us to do these installs, reducing their role largely to managing licensing. This even includes installing the IDE for our coders.

I can't complain that they've opened this up, except that there are a lot of choices to make, not just in what main elements to install, but in option selections in prompts presented by the installers. it would be nice if we could have NIPM build up a script of all the elements we're installing (IDE, extras, drivers) and all the selections we make during this process. It should then save the script when the NIPM session ends, and allow appending an existing script should a script be built up over multiple NIPM sessions that might be interrupted by a restart required by one of the installs.

Ideally these scripts, when run, would either bypass the restarts normally requested after some installs until the end of the complete process, or would auto-continue after restarts that couldn't be skipped. Also important would be having it gather together all license/agreement requirements into a single prompt at the start of the script so that they can all be accepted at the start of the process rather than being prompted as each element install starts, or, better yet, have the script do a "silent" install with all licensing considered to be accepted and no prompts appearing.

Additionally, these scripts should then be editable so that if users discover they need additional drivers or libraries, different versions, or don't need some elements, they can be added to, revised, or removed from the script. It would also be great if we could make scripts that included uninstallations in the script, so scripts to upgrade from one revision to another could be built.

My vision for these scripts is a simple collection of scripts that would let us quickly get any user or test system up and running with everything needed, whether it's a new employee or an existing user or system getting a computer refresh, with minimal hand-holding of the process and no (or minimal) mistakes. My thinking is we could have a small handful of installer scripts that would fit the needs of 90%+ of our different systems that all use LabVIEW, leaving one-off systems to need only a few NIPM runs to complete their setups.

Thanks,

Erik

In the "NIPM Era", removing all NI Software is very tricky.  First, you run "Add/Remove Programs" from Windows, go to NI Software, and try to get it to Remove All (this sometimes takes more than one pass, as you might have forgotten to ask it to remove updates).  This, in turn, invokes NIPM which does all the work -- NIPM itself "shows up" in the list of files, but cannot be selected (for obvious logical reasons).

Once everything is gone, NIPM still shows up in Programs and Features, but now the "Remove" checkbox is not disabled.  If you select it, you get Dire Warnings, but this is the only way to remove the "last" piece of NI Software (except when it isn't, but that's another story).

It would be nice if this process could be simplified.  One way to do this is to have NIPM detect that you have asked to remove everything except NIPM (because it is disabled), and have a Dialog Box pop up and say "Are you attempting to remove all NI Software, including NIPM?".  You could issue all the Dire Warnings at this point, and if the user chooses "Yes", you could do the appropriate two-step removal process, first removing "everything else", and when done, removing NIPM.  I realize that software removal, like software installation, sometimes requires a Reboot and "post-boot-up" code to "clean things up", but am confident that NI could figure out how to do this safely.

Bob Schor

there must be a better way to uninstall NIPM without having to uninstall all NI software as a prerequisite, at least that I hope there is

knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z000000kJ6oSAE&l=en-US

do consider allowing NIPM to be uninstalled independently, as I believe most of the pre-NIPM era users have and still require those 8.5-201x LabVIEWs (for maintenance and backward compatibility with legacy hardware) that were already installed properly (with kinks ironed out). NIPM to rebuild the feedlist based on pre-NIPM-install NI software products, maybe?