LabVIEW and Linux - Intro

[swatts]

Hello Angry Masses, 

When I'm not marching on Castle FrankensteNI with a pitchfork in one hand I have been looking at installing LabVIEW and NI-VISA on Linux to play with our Pico hardware.

More of my customers/jobs are wanting to use LabVIEW with Linux. As part of our Community Training Initiative we need to load LabVIEW and Drivers onto Linux, and the experience wasn't seamless. But the results were really impressive after a bit of work.

So here I we will go through various different distros and see what the install experience and performance is like on VM and on a tiny old computer.

For this series of articles I will be installing the distro, LabVIEW 2023Q3 and NI-VISA on a Virtual Machine in Virtualbox and on a Lenovo SFF (Lenovo Thinkcentre M72e Tiny i3-3220T 8GB RAM 120GB SSD. 2.80GHz, the CPU was first seen in 2011!).

The Intel i3-3220T has a PassMark average score of 1933

Compared to the CPU on a LattePanda 3 Delta 864 which has an Intel N5105 with a PassMark average score 4066

It should give an idea about how weedy a system I'm testing on.

I will then test how LabVIEW looks and feels using our CTI stuff and I will then try loading a larger program and see how that works. I will also try and explain the various package managers and commands and what they are doing as I found the documentation was heavy on cutting and pasting and light on the why!

I will try and video the screen for the various distros and the install process for LabVIEW and drivers as I go along.

Georgios Tsalavoutis has been doing a lot of this work too, so I might push my material onto his blog (if he wants) and just link them from here.

Finally I'm trying out a tool called Ventoy, that allows you to have various distros (ISO files) on a flash drive and they come up as bootable images...

Caveat: I am not an expert in Linux, this is written from the perspective of what I learn as I go through my Linux journey. If I make mistakes, please point them out in a non-Linux support way  ("why would you do that!, you obviously don't know what you're doing")and more in a LabVIEW way ("what are you trying to achieve, here's some options and why they might work"). 

So to get the ball rolling, let's look at Ventoy and run through how it works.

It can be found here.

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

and according to their website it is an open source tool to create a bootable USB drive. In practice it's a drive you drop ISOs onto and these will come up as bootable options when you hardware boots up. It's magic!

From their downloads page I downloaded ventoy-1.0.96-windows.zip (if you are from the future your numbers may be bigger)

It goes through the sourceforge page so apologies for that!

Extract it and you will see the following 

Now plug in a nice new and big USB drive.

Double Click on Ventoy2Disk.exe

It seems to find the USB OK, press [Install].

The drive will be formatted and then it acts as a normal drive (actually 2 normal drives, but ignore the second drive), but when you drop ISOs onto it they magically become bootable.

As a demo I dropped Rocky Linux onto it, (It's on the I:Drive because I had already downloaded Rocky on another computer and it has a lot of drives)

Now all you have to do is plug it into the lil Lenovo and it should try to boot it up (I'll use my fully loaded Ventoy drive to show how it looks with some more ISOs loaded)

As you can see you can just select the ISO from the bootable device. Very nice indeed.

The next article will likely be loading Rocky Linux and LabVIEW on my lil Lenovo and some performance tests.

After that it will be how to do it on Virtualbox and VMWare.

Then we'll check out some other distros, rinse and repeat.

Happy New Year!