Mandriva 2009.1(Cooker) and Opensuse 11.1- KAL Breaks

[anshuljain]

Shawn,

I really appreciate your honest answer regarding the support question for future Linux versions...and especially Mandriva.

The decision of not to support 2009.1 in the forthcoming releases is indeed very sad as I had almost standardized on Mandriva as the deployment platform for all of our manufacturing test systems. I develop/administer close to 20-30 manufacturing systems and will now have to re-evaluate my future distro deployment as it is completely dependent on NI-KAL compatibility in addition to others as well.

I had always kept the fallback option of Opensuse open incase it doesn't work out with Mandriva. But Opensuse is sort of a pain to setup compared to Mandriva...in general for a user and also for NI-KAL and NI-VISA. I do wish that the support for Mandriva 2009.1 comes back in the future...and understand the economic compulsions behind such a decision.

Is there an official channel where I can give a feedback on Labview for Linux? I find no one in my country (India) who understands anything about Linux. I would really appreciate if you could give me an official contact point for Labview on Linux on my official email ID: anshulj (at) tejasnetworks (dot) com.

It would be great if a beta system for NI-KAL is created that users can try and report back problems/issues. I believe this would also reduce the burden of testing NI-KAL many distros as you had pointed out. Probably we could report back the problems through a bug tracking tool too? This would be similar to what several open-source projects do to reduce their testing burden. Just a thought, which I'm sure is similar to what you have in mind as well.

-Anshul

[EWTech]

The reasons for support of one version of Linux over another has to do with more than just popularity. These distributions each try to outdo each other with covenience features, their version of standard library locations, a modified kernel configuration, standard kernel features supported out of the box and /opt, /usr, and /lib structures. It's an impossible task to support every possibility. In this case the very flexibility of the system is it's own downfall. Add to this the toolset used for administration and package management, "standard" libraries loaded by default, KDE vs. Gnome... It insane!

If NI picked a distribution and stuck with it I'd go there. I use OpenSuse but the fact is there is no reason to stick with any distribution at all. They are remarkably similar in most respects. I have used all of them at one time or another. If they have to support more than one then pick a distribution with each package system type:

RPM: Redhat or Suse

Apt: Ubuntu or Debian

The other option is to create a distibution based on or provided by one of the big players. I bet they would love to help you out if it would grow their user base. Redhat is the biggest server vendor but Cannonical and Novell are the distributions with the most desktops these days. I personally think that to try to support all distributions out of the box is a complete waste of time.

[Jeff2]

Hi.  We recently tried to install Labview 8.6.1, Ni-Kal 1.9, and Daxmx Base on a new laptop with Opensuse 11.1 and obviously ran into problems covered in this post.  Since this was a fresh install, we were free to experiment with the OS and software.  After a few attempts, I managed to get a successful install of the mentioned software on 11.1.  We had a set of instructions we were using for 10.3 and an older Ni-Kal version.  I modified them and added a few steps for 11.1.  This involves a fresh installation of Suse (without pae support) and building a new kernel.  I thought I would post them in case anyone finds them useful.  This could probably be done on an existing install by building and running another kernel, but we chose to make it the default since we had the luxury of a fresh install.  As I mentioned before, these were modified from a previous set of instructions so I tried to update any references to older software and version numbers.  Sorry of I failed to catch one.  Also, some commands may not be necessary anymore but following them all worked for us.  Since this involves messing with the kernel, I wouldn't recommend it unless you are confident with what you are doing or are installing on a fresh OS installation as was our case.  Anyway, we are up and running with our device now.

[RichardNeiill]

We did get it working on Mandriva 2009.1. This post may help you:

http://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/8383