Installing NI-VISA on [K]ubuntu 24.04

[pgfeld]

I am trying to install NI-VISA on a completely fresh install of Kubuntu 24.04 to control my BCS6401 power supply over USB.

I've followed the instructions here, choosing ni-visa at step 6.  Everything seemed to work fine (except sudo dkms autoinstall in step 8 did not print any output, I don't know if it should or not), however in Python, calling pyvisa.ResourceManager() causes the following error:

libnipalu.so failed to initialize
Verify that nipalk.ko is built and loaded.
Aborted (core dumped)

I found this post which seems to be the same problem, but there are no replies 😞

[pgfeld]

Update: I found this post which starts with the same issue and says they resolved it by running /usr/local/natinst/nikal/binupdateNIDrivers (before having another problem).  However, the directory /nikal does not exist under /usr/local/natinst at all for me.  The only things at that directory are the directories lib64, .nicore, niPythonInterface and share.

[pgfeld · Accepted solution]

I found this post.  Despite the post being about WSL, final comment's suggestion fixed my issue by running this install:

sudo apt-get install ni-visa ni-visa-devel ni-kal-

What is ni-kal-?  Is it different from ni-kal (which I already supposedly had installed)?