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What do you think of remastersys?

I would like to know the opinion of people included in this group (especially NI staff) about Remastersys. To summarize Remastersys is a wonderful software for debian distros. With this tool you can make a new live DVD/CD with all programs and all your data. The live DVD/CD created can be installed in ANY PC, it isn't necessary that the second PC has the same hardware than the  first one. In other words, with Remastersys you can make a ad hoc distro.

Every day we can see that the installation of several NI packages to control external and internal NI devices,it's sometimes far from being easy. I don't criticize NI, I know that is impossible to give support for every linux distro. But I think that remastersys is another reason more to include this distro in that select group...redhat,mandriva,suse. Why? Because NI can install all NI packages (DAQmx,488.2,visa,nikal,nipal,etc) in a PC and after running Remastersys you have a live DVD/CD with all this packages working properly. Imagine a Ubuntu/Debian operation system with Labview and all this packages ready to work, it's the final solution.

On the other hand there is a legal problem because Ubuntu/Debian has GPL licence. This kind of licence forces to make part of Labview open source...

What is your opinion?

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I haven't used remastersys myself. (yet)  But it does sound very interesting.


I've been playing around with Linux Live CDs for a few years now, and pretty much right from the start I thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if I could take my favorite DE with me on any computer?" 

Another really useful tool for me would be able to create a CD for my customers that had both the operating system and their application on it, all ready to re-install easily should they run into problems with the original PC. 

Obviously though, this creates a number of licensing issues.  I might not want my customers to install the software I wrote on dozens or hundreds of machines.   This is easily overcome however.  But the licensing issues surrounding LabVIEW itself are not so easily overcome. 

Hopefully NI will continue to develop products for the Linux platform.  As they mature, I'm sure licensing issues will be addressed.  Hopefully to the benefit of all.

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Patrick Allen: FunctionalityUnlimited.ca
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So you think we should make our own NI Linux distro?  The question is would you use it?  We currently support RHEL, openSUSE, and Mandriva, but customers are still asking for Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, and Scientific Linux.  I suspect if we made a NI Linux distro few would want to use it.  We could potentially add "NI Linux" as another officially supported distribution, but the hardest part about supporting more Linux distributions is the testing burden.  We currently have to run our tests on 6 versions of Linux (the latest two of our 3 supported), 4 versions of Windows, and 2 versions of Mac OS X.  Even with automated testing, it is more work testing Linux than Windows, and while I wish it wasn't true Windows generates most of our revenue.

If customers want to use a Linux distribution that isn't officially supported by NI, by all means go ahead and try.  If you run into problems feel free to post them to this group.  I can't guarantee that you will get an answer or an immediate fix, but I'll help out where I can and do my best to make sure any fixes make it back into the products for the next release.

Shawn Bohrer

National Instruments

Use NI products on Linux? Come join the NI Linux Users Community
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So you think we should make our own NI Linux distro?

I think that's a great idea.

Would I use it?

Quite likely.  Typically if I'm putting LabVIEW on Linux box, then the main use for the box is probably going to be the LabVIEW app I'm writing.  So a LabVIEW-centric disto makes perfect sense to me.  (Although as of yet I've not done any customer work in Linux)

Developing their own "flavor" of Linux might not be in the corporate interest of NI.  But it could be fun for the developers.  NI splash screens and even an NI theme to the desktop could all be default.  NI might also be able to use it's corporate powers and negotiate to include other useful but proprietary software in their own distro.  Certainly something worth thinking about.    

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Patrick Allen: FunctionalityUnlimited.ca
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I hand-rolled an NI Live CD for internal training, troubleshooting, and sales demonstrations. It has LabVIEW versions 8 through 8.6 and every NI driver that supports Linux (VISA, GPIB, FGEN, SCOPE, DMM, DAQmx, DAQmx Base). I agree that the all-in-one OS, ADE, and driver package is appealing and very helpful for distributing to clients and customers alike.

I use Debian at home, but the NI Live CD I made used OpenSUSE 10.3 as its base. The hand-rolling took some patience and a few iterations to get right, so if Rematersys truly can streamline the process, that would be very encouraging.

But I agree more with Shawn -- customers don't like to be asked to change distros if they're using one that we don't test and support. They want to use the distro of their choice (and I think they should). Asking them to change to a distro maintained by NI is not only asking them to change distros, but asking them to choose a distro with a very small user base when compared against mainstream ones like RedHat and SUSE. Linux thrives on its community, and moving to a specialized but sparce community may have more detriments than benefits.

Joe Friedrichsen

National Instruments

Joe Friedchicken
NI Configuration Based Software
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Principal Software Engineer :: Configuration Based Software
Senior Software Engineer :: Multifunction Instruments Applications Group (until May 2018)
Software Engineer :: Measurements RLP Group (until Mar 2014)
Applications Engineer :: High Speed Product Group (until Sep 2008)
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