Installtion and libnipalu.so problems

[DiBosco]

Folks,

Am trying to install v5 of NI-VISA on Mandriva. I realise that this is not an officially supported distribution for v5, but I know from experience most Linux distributions work with things like this even though they are not supported. For example, I had no real issues with Altera's development environment, even though Suse and Red Hat were the supported versions. With Mandriva being a Red Hat fork, I have always found what runs on Red Hat runs on Mandriva.

Now, without dpkg I was able to install, but got the libnipalu.so problems everyone seems to get! Running updateNIDrivers apparently worked just fine, but I still got the libnipalu.so issues. I uninstaled NI-VISA, installed dpkg and now I just get this when I try ./INSTALL:

./INSTALL: line 727: cd: /media/NIVISA500L: No such file or directory

I got the same libnipalu.so with v4.4 which does support Mandriva, so I am not at all convinced this is a distribution issue with v5.

So, can anyone shed any light on this please? :~) Am I just not going to get this working on Mandriva 2010.0? Is there really something about it that will stop it working? I do appreciate this is not an officially supported version.

Many thanks.

Rob

[irwan]

I don't know Mandriva much, but I'd start troubleshooting from your kernel log file. Use dmesg, and find out more stuff.

nipal depends on nikal. Most of the time, nipal doesn't load because nikal was not installed correctly. nikal is a kernel only piece. If your install is good, you should be able to 'modprobe nikal' and have it not error out.

[DiBosco]

Thanks for the reply, irwan.

modprobe nikal just returns, giving no info. According to the package manager nipali and nipalki are both installed.

rpm -qa | grep ^ni

nivisa-5.0.0-f0

niorbi-1.9.3-f0

nivisa-devel-5.0.0-f0

nipxirmi-1.6.0-f0

nispyi-2.7.2-f0

nipali-2.5.4-f0

nicvirte-8.0-7

nivisaserver-5.0.0-f0

nikali-2.0.0-f0

nidimi-1.10.0-f0

nimdnsresponder-1.1.0-f3

nirpci-4.2.0-f0

nivisa-config-5.0.0-f0

nivisak-5.0.0-f0

nipalki-2.5.4-f0

lsmod | grep ni

nikal                  69016  0

Is that of any help? :~)

[irwan]

grep kernel messages on nipal, see what it says?

if it doesn't provide useful clue, attach niSystemReport output here.

[DiBosco]

Ah...

dmesg | grep -i nipal

[nipal] More than 4GB of addressable memory detected.

[nipal] This configuration is not supported.  Check the release notes for more information.

Which is weird as I only have 2x2GB DIMMs installed!

So, I need a machine with less memory?

I tried putting Open SuSE 11.2 on a spare laptop and ./INSTALL doesn't compile because, apparently, 11.2 no longer has the kernel source available!

[JoeFriedchicken]

No, but you need to pass mem=4096M on the kenel boot command. The Linux kernel can choose to map memory above the 4 GB boundary even when less than 4 GB of physical memory is present. NI drivers look at the size of the virtual address space, not the physical address space, since that's the memory they get to access 😉

[DiBosco]

Woo Hoo! mem=4096M (missing the M off was a mistake! ) does the trick.

Fantastic. visaconf doesn't see my TDS2004B even though lsusb shows it's there. So, this is my next piece of research. Thanks everyone for your help.

[Vids65]

Hi,

Basically I'm having the same problems... Did you solve anything? Would be helpfull to know! 😉

Thanks

[DiBosco]

Not with USB I'm afraid. I got it going on a 3000 Scope with Ethernet.

[JoeFriedchicken]

DiBosco wrote:

Fantastic. visaconf doesn't see my TDS2004B even though lsusb shows it's there. So, this is my next piece of research. Thanks everyone for your help.

DiBosco wrote:

Not with USB I'm afraid. I got it going on a 3000 Scope with Ethernet.

VISA 5.1.x cannot communicate with devices that have been claimed by the USBTMC driver. What happens when you follow the steps below?

Why Can't I Access my Third Party USB Device in Linux?

http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/A10090850FF0887A86257926007A7E96

Vids65 wrote:

Basically I'm having the same problems... Did you solve anything?

Please describe your device, Linux distribution and bitness, symptoms, and what you've tried so far to solve your problem.