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Why use LabVIEW on Linux?

With Windows XP no longer supported many companies need to upgrade to Windows 7. I personally dropped my XP machine for Linux OpenSUSE. To my surprise the transition was farily easy. 

 

I am curious to know who uses LabVIEW Linux in a profissional/industrial setting? Is there any particular market that favors Linux? 

When I browse the forum trying to get a feal for this, the majority of the questions are coming from college students or acidemic scientist. 

 

I can see many cases where a test station is designed to do one purpose. It is designed to test. In some facilities it must test a product for a very long time. It makes sense to have a simple Linux Distro on a deployed machine in production facility, but I've never seen this. 

 

If NI is selling LabVIEW for Linux who are their cusotmers?


Engineering - The art of applied creativity  ~Theo Sutton
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MrQuestion wrote:

I can see many cases where a test station is designed to do one purpose. It is designed to test. In some facilities it must test a product for a very long time. It makes sense to have a simple Linux Distro on a deployed machine in production facility, but I've never seen this. 


Well, this (and much more) is what you get with the new linux based embedded systems (e.g. Ni cRIO-9068, myRIO) 😄

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@MrQuestion wrote:

 

If NI is selling LabVIEW for Linux who are their cusotmers?


Perhaps foreign companies who don't want an OS with a backdoor the NSA can open any time they want???

LabVIEW Pro Dev & Measurement Studio Pro (VS Pro) 2019 - Unfortunately now moving back to C#, .NET, Python due to forced change to subscription model by NI. 8^{
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I was looking for something more substantial, but I do see security as a very valid business decision. I remember sometime around 2000 a virus (I believe the Melissa Virus) took out the facilities production lines. 

 

At the time I was taking a dedicated ATP machine that had an 8085 processor on it running homemade code, and upgrading the procedure to use Windows 98 with LabVIEW 4.0. With the production line down because of the virus I was thinking that using Windows OS for a crital production line manufacturing is a really bad idea and is only a fad.  But, for some reason people continued using Windows OS for critical production testing. 

 

I really like dedicated devices such as LabVIEW Real Time. It’s easy to create a web interface, and as far as I know there have been no major security issues.

 

 


Engineering - The art of applied creativity  ~Theo Sutton
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For me, the limited feature set, device drivers, and toolkits have steered me away from desktop linux. There always seems to be a lot of low level programming required as well.

It seems a chicken and egg story. Poor sales because it doesn't do as much as the Windows version and lack of sales means you can't dedicate more resources for development. I would imagine that the wide variety of distros with numerous changes is also a factor.
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With the newer LabVIEW 2013 Real-Time Module supporting “NI Linux Real-Time OS” I wonder what the long term objective is for NI and Linux.

For years LabVIEW Real-Time ran on either Phar Lap ETS or VxWorks depending on your hardware. When I heard that the new cRIO-906X will be using Linux I was shocked. I have worked in LabVIEW Real-Time for a long time, and unlike the traditional LabVIEW I don’t see nearly as many changes with LabVIEW Real-Time with each new release.

Do you think this will change with the introduction of Linux?

VxWorks is popular, but I’m willing to bet that Linux offers many more productivity development tools.

This could lead to a surge of interest in LabVIEW Real-Time for Linux.

 


Engineering - The art of applied creativity  ~Theo Sutton
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I use Linux at home for everything except games but we're stuck with Windows at work.  We have a few problems every time we update Windows but since I can't speak for Linux/LabVIEW I don't know if it would be better or worse.  There are a few threads on the subject here and at LAVA.  Do a search for "LabVIEW Linux vs Windows". 

 

Here is some info on Linux DAQ with more relevant links at the bottom you might be interested in:  http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/websearch/DA11427DB450FDCB86256257005717D0?OpenDocument

LabVIEW Pro Dev & Measurement Studio Pro (VS Pro) 2019 - Unfortunately now moving back to C#, .NET, Python due to forced change to subscription model by NI. 8^{
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One issue I have ran into in the corperate environment is most IT people are "Microsoft Certified" and they tow the Microsoft line. 

 

Getting them to accept a linux box is nearly impossible, and if ther is no other option (as for a few of our tools unrelated to LabView) that linux box is not allowed on the corperate network.

 

Even with recent security warning about Internet Explorer we are still not allowed to uas any other web browser than Internet Explorer. 

 

But the XP issue you bring up is really a non-issue, just because Microsoft has dropped support for XP it does not mean it will stop working. We have a few machines running Windows 2000 in the lab. They run just fine for the tasks they are used for.

 

The dire warnings about XP are just industry FUD by paid industry shills trying to give new PC sales a boost. If you have made it this long running XP without being wipped out by a virus or malware then you are abvously running thrid party security software and/or have your machines behind a firewall.

 

As for storys about production lines being brought doen by a virus, I have to ask why these machines are connected to the network and allowed to run unprotected? Why would a production ATE need internet access? 

 

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=== Engineer Ambiguously ===
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I still don't have a clear picture of people using LabVIEW for Linux.

 

There must be a customer base that NI sells to; or else NI wouldn't make it.

 

The Linux version doesn't support the NI License manager. Actually it has no registration at all.

So, I can't see this being accepted in a corporate environment. It would be difficult to track installs per the license agreement. 

 

 

Is LabVIEW for Linux some NI engineer’s pet project? 


Engineering - The art of applied creativity  ~Theo Sutton
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Because be they few, there are companies that use Linux.

 

It's pretty straight forward, there must have been enough demand for a Linux version of LabView for NI to develop it.

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=== Engineer Ambiguously ===
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