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NI Scope on Linux?

Hi,

Has anyone tried getting NI Scope 3.1 to work on any Linux distribution? The stated supported distros are very old - here's the list from the README:

* Mandrakelinux 10.1 Official

* Mandriva Linux 2006

* SUSE LINUX Professional 9.3

* SUSE LINUX 10.0

* Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3

I was reluctant to use distributions from 2006 so tried some more recent ones - from having the NI Scope installation fail on a recent Debian distro and then on Ubuntu, I know I need a 2.6 or 2.4 kernel, and a rpm based distro. I've tried the install on a Fedora 15 machine and get a failure saying

************************************ ERROR *************************************

* Kernel source does not appear to be installed for the 2.6.43.8-1.fc15.i686.PAE kernel.

*    Installation of the kernel-source package for kernel 2.6.43.8-1.fc15.i686.PAE is

*                   required to continue this installation.

************************************ ERROR *************************************

I get the same error when following the steps here to install Ni-KAL. I've installed the kernel-devel package and as far as I am aware, there is no kernel-source package for Fedora.

I'm willing to change to any distribution that looks like it has worked successfully with NI-Scope, although it would be nice if I could use Fedora. Have people found workarounds for using NI Scope with Fedora, or are there any how-to's out there for Ni Scope and Linux?

Thanks very much,

Ana

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Message 1 of 11
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Hi,

I succesfully install it under Scientific Linux 6.x (still supported). I don't remember exactly full kernel version number, but it something like 2.6.x. Use kernel without PAE. If you have 4GB RAM or more, dicrease the amout of available RAM by adding parameter to grub line menu.

Trick installation:

1. First install NI Scope 3.1. You get installation error.

2. After it install NI-DAQmx 8.0.2 for Linux. By this you fixed NI-Scope installation.

I think, it should be work under Fedora 15 with kernel 2.6.x

Message 2 of 11
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Hi mig-31,

Thanks for the response! I tried those steps but haven't been successful on the Fedora 15 machine (with the PAE kernel), so am booting Scientific Linux 6 on another machine now and will try the same procedure. For completeness, I kept getting the same error as before about the kernel source not being installed when I tried to install NI-DAQmx 8.0.2.

Out of curiosity, is there a reason not to use the PAE kernel?

Thanks,

Ana

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There are technical reasons that we can't fix due to backward compatibility that prevents our software to be functional with PAE on 32bit.

If you have > 4GB RAM, you might consider using 64bit Linux.. but I don't know if the driver supports 64bit Linux

If you have 32bit, the max memory you can have is 4GB, otherwise our 32bit driver won't work.. Sorry

Message 4 of 11
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@amagalon  install kernel-devel package before driver installation

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Hi everyone,

Thanks very much for the helpful responses!

I switched to Scientific Linux 6.6 (32bit) and was able to install NI-DAQmx and NI-Scope successfully (also remembering to limit the memory with grub and installing kernel-devel, gcc, make, etc).

Thanks!

Ana

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Message 6 of 11
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you welcome,

it good that next user use NI hardware under Linux and let know NI to improve Linux support.

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There's a lot of progress being made internally in NI to improve our Linux support. So there's hope on that front. I just can't say anymore than this, since I'm just a lowly engineer. It's unavoidable that Linux is becoming more important. It's definitely exciting!

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Hi Irwan, mig-31,

It's good to know that there's a community out there using NI on LInux! Definitely helps in working through installation troubleshooting 🙂

I may have assumed all was well too soon - I now have my PCI-5114 card installed and when I run nilsdev I get the famous

'libnipalu.so failed to initialize'

error. Running updateNIDrivers as root finishes successfully.

I know a lot of people have encountered this before and that the solutions involve either doing ./UNINSTALL ./INSTALL of NI-DAQmx, or making sure that the memory is really limited to <4GB. I haven't tried uninstalling/installing NI-SCOPE as well, though.

I did add the flag mem=4096M to the kernel line in my /boot/grub/menu.lst file, although it doesn't seem to have taken, since when I look at the kernel error messages doing

dmesg | grep -i nipal

on the command line, I  get the message:

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

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

As a last note, the command lsdaq returns 'command not found'. I'll look more into how to limit the memory in Scientific Linux 6.6, but just thought I'd post this in case anyone's run into this particular scenario, where the memory flag has been added to grub but the system doesn't seem to recognize the change.

Thanks!

Ana

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Message 9 of 11
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I don't know much beyond mem=4096M thing to limit your physical address. Search around in this forums. This isn't a new problem. There are some other things people have tried, but I can't remember of the top of my head.   

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