Minimal VISA installation for Linux? (Gentoo, Ebuilds, ...)

[AKHuettel]

Dear all,

we want to use the visa library under linux to access and control GPIB and serial devices.

What parts of the software in the .iso file that can be downloaded form NI are actually necessary for a minimal VISA installation?

Background:

We only want to link a C++ program against the visa library, no LabView.We're currently working on writing ebuilds to install VISA on a Gentoo system. NI-KAL and NI-PAL are finished, but what else do we need (i.e. ORB, RPC)? For now we'd like to keep it as simple as possible.

Best, Andreas

[ninlmartijn]

Dear AKHuettel,

Thank you for your forum post.

Wit NI VISA there are two versions; one for the development environment and one for a runtime environment. The runtime environment has only the necessary parts to runt your application with the VISA components. This installation file is about 5 MB. Unfortunately there is no runtime version for Linux OS (only MAC and Windows). But maybe it can be used as a reference to see what components are installed.

I also noticed that the VISA 3.1 version for Linux is a very small installer, this installer is still available at this location. .

Please notice that we do recommend to use the complete latest version.

Best regards,

[AKHuettel]

Hi Martijn,

I'll have a look at the windows version when I have the time. Most likely we'll just try to get our linux program running first though - we have finished Gentoo ebuilds for ni-kal, ni-pal, ni-visa (the ...visa and ...visak rpm's) and ni-gpib by now (without testing with real gpib devices yet, but it compiles and/or installs and should behave the same as after a proper installation with the NI install script for SuSE / RedHat).

When reading the postinstall (and other) scripts we came across a few potential issues -do you know a contact at NI where we could help bug-fixing the linux packages? 🙂

Best, 

Andreas