Who has NI-DAQMX working on Debian Etch (2.6.18 kernel) ?

[JohnBoers]

Hi everyone,

I am working on getting a very complex combination of NI-products to work on Debian Etch (4.0) which has a 2.6.18-6-686 kernel and cant get it to work properly.

What I need is a combination of following packages:

- NI-4882 2.5 (or newer)

- NI-DAQMX 8.0 (or newer)

- NI-DAQMX-BASE 3.1.0

- NI-VISA 4.3.0

I need to support all of these packages (possibly all) on a sigle Debian Etch target machine which uses following hardware:

- one or more NI-488 (PCI-GPIB) cards

- one or more NI-6733 (PCI) cards

- one or more NI-6229 (PCI) cards

- optionally one or more NI-USB-6008 modules.

I have tried to create debian packages (using alien) and install them but seem to only get the GPIB, USB and VISA tools to work, but not the DAQMX stuff.

We need the DAQMX support because our own software uses the hardware directly using NI-API's. We got DAQMX 8 partially working on a Debian Sarge (2.6.8) kernel, but somehow the nikal and nipal drivers on the 2.6.18-6-686 kernel complain about unresolved symbols (dmesg states: nipalk: no version for "nNIKAL100_getTimeOfDayInterval" found...), but they do not complain on the 2.6.8 kernel and I have to upgrade to Debian Etch for other reasons. The tool nilsdev does not report anything, nidaqmxconfig reports the common 50150 error in all cases.

I have tried the following tips and tricks I could find on the NI-forums:

- Corrected errors in install/uninstall scripts (the usual symlink errors)

- Installed linux-headers-`uname -r`

- Correcting the asm-/_offsets.h problem

- Correcting modpost problem (SZ set to 1024) and rebuilt modpost using GCC 4.1.2

- Executed updateNIDrivers serveral times without compile or install problems... (but it complained about removal of nimru2k...)

But still get the same problems, even when I:

- Changed order of installing packages

- Explicitly disabled SELinux stuff

- Explicitly rebooted the system several times

- Explicitly installed the hardware before the software and the other way around

- Changed combinations of versions of nikal and nipal/nipalk, even tried the nikal15 patch on nikal15

- Put the nescessary debug statements in the palModuleMgr shell script...which didn't report any errors at all...

Does anyone have a clue what is happening with or within the NI kernel modules?

Do I need to use ni-unversioned.o kernel objects specifically compiled for a 2.6.18 kernel?

Does the kernel itself (symbol table) not support resolving of module symbols with lengths of above 500 chars?

My niSystemReport states for all nixxxk-unversioned objects something about linux-2.4k, am I using the wrong NI-DAQMX distributions??

This seems like a lot of trial and error work, but now I am out of options.

Please let me know if someone has some hints towards working solutions.

With kind regards,

JohnBoers

P.S: we are currently using about 100 NI cards and devices! Are there any NI professionals able to help out the growing group of Debian linux users?

[BasvanDijke]

Dear John,

Unfortunately we do not support Linux Debian.

Via this link you find the supported Linux distributions.

Regards,

Bas van Dijke
AE, Netherlands