LabVIEW Idea Exchange

A lot of engineers prefer Linux over Windows and would use it on there test machines if at all possible. Instead of attempting to support a wide variety of flavors, wouldn't it be better if NI would derive it's own flavor from an existing distribution and committed to having full support for all NI software and hardware for this new flavor. This would give Linux aficionados the OS they crave and NI the power to control the direction of the OS such that it makes hardware and software compatibility easier.

Currently LabVIEW only has support for Mandriva, RedHat and SUSE Linux.  What's even worse, only 32-bit versions of those are supported.  Today, 64-bit linux installations are on huge raise, and Ubuntu is getting more and more popular.  LabVIEW Linux support should be expanded to include Ubuntu, and 64-bit versions are needed.

 

cheers,

Pekko

 

It has come up in discusssions that NI does not really cater to hobbyists. A cheap and functional version of LabVIEW is limited to the student edition, which is restricted to a small subset of potential users.

 

 From the  FAQ:

"The LabVIEW Student Edition is available to students, faculty, and staff for personal educational use only. It is not intended for research or institutional use."

 

As a suggested first step, I suggest to remove the academia restriction and mold it into a new product:

 

--- LabVIEW personal edition ---

 

Licensed as follows:

"The LabVIEW Personal Edition is for personal use only. It is not intended for commercial, research or institutional use."

 

 It would be available to anyone for noncommercial home use.

 

LabVIEW currently has the home use exemption that allows installing a copy at home. Unfortunately, if you lose your job, you not only lose your health insurance, but you also lose access to LabVIEW, thus hampering any self paced LabVIEW tinkering that possibly would improve future job prospects. I am sure many retired LabVIEW engineers would love some recreational LabVIEW use. They could be a great asset, because they will have more time helping out in the community and forums. They could even give guest presentations at user group meetings, for example.

 

The LabVIEW personal edition should include all modules of interest to the hobbyist, including application builder, embedded, FPGA, and robotics.  We should be able to distribute built applications as freeware. Support would be limited to community support.

 

Installing LabVIEW on every single private home computer in the world would cost NI exactly nothing (except for some sales of the current student edition which is about the price of a textbook, some internet bandwidth, and loss of the zero to two (?) multi-millionaires who actually bought the NI developer suite for themselves. ;)). 99.9% of users would never touch it, but that 0.1% could come up with great new application areas and would help spread the word on how great LabVIEW really is. Soon 0.2% would use it. 🙂

 

It should follow the "customer class limited" Freemium model, (as defined by Chris Anderson), i.e. limited to personal home use in this case.

 

The running applications should be clearly identified to prevent commercial use. The splash screen and "about" screen should prominently display the words LabVIEW and National Instruments and could even be used for NI advertising and product placements, for example.

 

 

If I'm the first to post this Idea then I'll be shocked.

The Idea is simple. We all love programming in LabVIEW, and I'm sure that we've all at one time or another had a colleague, friend or family member ask if we know how to do something on the PC. The immediate thought is I don't know where to get the software to do that, but I could write a simple LabVIEW app  in a few hours that does the job.

E.G hunt through someone's PC and move all of the jpg files over a certain size to a specific location so they can easily find their holiday snaps.

 

You can't create this simple function for them, because if you do, and build an exe, they still need the Runtime engine.

 

Surely for REALLY simple stuff (File IO, basic comms stuff in the Base LabVIEW edition ...) - not DAQ or anything like that it is possible to create an EXE that INCLUDES the runtime components that it needs and is stand alone.

 

This would open up LabVIEW for the use of making quick gadget like apps for the office as well as test and measurement.

 

I can't se how this could be a bad thing.

Add an  option in the installer build to run cleanup-programs during uninstall.

 

On the advanced tab in the Installer build there is an option called: "Run executable at end of installation", but there is no such option for the deinstallation.

 

We use the existing option to run a batch file that installs and starts the application as a service. If the user decides to uninstall the application we would like to run another batch file to stop and deinstall  the service - but there is no option to run an executable during deinstallation.

The list of available destinations when you build an installer includes Common App Data Folder, but not Personal App Data. So instead of being able to just install an initial set of settings during installation we always need to hard-code the creation of those files.

 

It would be conventient if PersonalAppData was available as a destination as well - or even better; that the options included *all* the OS's standard folder references. Or that you could at least create new references to such system folders.