clarification of working solution in ubuntu.

[alexatvirginia]

i have read a few forum posts, and tutorials about nikal/nivisa/ni488 on ubuntu and havent been able to get a coherent picture of that will and wont work at the moment.

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-6742 

my end goal is to be able to use a ni GPIB-USB-HS with pyvisa. pyvisa relies on NI-VISA. and as i understand it the  NI-VISA needs 'NI passports' to talk to their GPIB driver (NI-488.2) and NI-VISA will not work with the opensource linux-gpib drivers, which is unfortunate.

Communities: GPIB-USB-HS + Ubuntu 9.04 (x86, kernel...

so, this means to make this work i need:

NI-VISA

NI-488.2

for some reason unknown to me, there seems to be a dependency on NI-KAL. if this is true, then i would need

NI-KAL

NI-VISA

NI-488.2

i have also read that NI-488.2 does not support kernels > 2.6.25, but then have read posts about success with NI-488.2 on ubuntu 9.04's kernel 2.6.28-13.

Communities: Installed NI-VISA 4.5 in Ubuntu 9.04

does not support mean 'will not work' or 'we dont gurantee anything'

i am running ubuntu 9.10 with kernel 2.6.31-16, and recieve an error about an unkown kernel symbol: 'init_mm' when i try to insert the nikal module as described in the above posts.

can someone point me in the right direction for a sure solution, i dont mind installing a different OS version, as long as it will work.

thanks

alex

[Islero]

Hi Alex,

From my part I can not give you a qualified answer. I am not the developer of the packages that you are commenting, only I am a Linux user who has tried to gather whole information to create a tutorial for Ubuntu users. Like author of the manual that you have alluded, I can say you that NIKAL is an essential package because it is responsible of installation of kernel-modules. The real problem of the VISA installation in my opinion is the installation of necessary kernel-modules, especially nikal,nipal and  gpibprtk. I have a idea but I don't really know how works those modules and the packages involved (nikal,nipali and etc) although I would like to know it. We must wait a answer by Shawn ("the Master") meanwhile it could be a good idea that you write down a coherent manual about "how to use PyVisa and GPIB-USB-HS" .

Regards

[Shawn B.]

Hey Alex,

It actually sounds like you understand everything, except for this:

i have also read that NI-488.2 does not support kernels > 2.6.25, but then have read posts about success with NI-488.2 on ubuntu 9.04's kernel 2.6.28-13.

Communities: Installed NI-VISA 4.5 in Ubuntu 9.04

does not support mean 'will not work' or 'we dont gurantee anything'

The problem is that you have a GPIB-USB-HS.  In order to use this device you need a device driver.  There are two drivers that I know of for this device.  NI-488.2 provided by National Instruments, and the open source linux gpib package.  In kernel 2.6.25 the Linux kernel developers made the USB device driver APIs GPL only which means that the NI-488.2 driver can no longer support any USB devices in kernels > 2.6.25 since it is uses a proprietary license.  The NI-488.2 driver does work on newer kernels, but only for PCI, and ENET devices.

So you have two choices.  You can install an older Linux distribution like openSUSE 10.3, RHEL 5, CentOS 5 etc.  That would let you use NI-488.2, and NI-VISA with your GPIB-USB-HS.  Or you can use the open source driver on probably any Linux distribution, but you won't be able to use pyvisa.  I believe the open source driver provides a python API if that makes any difference.

You could also purchase a PCI-GPIB board and use still use NI-488.2 and NI-VISA, and thus pyvisa.  For this to work you will still need to use either a NI officially supported distribution, or follow some of the successful tutorials posted in this community.

--

Shawn