Fedora Core 6 How-to

[ninevoltz]

By the way, are there any plans to support RHEL 5 soon?

Thanks.

[tereshkosg]

Yeah, Could you please let us know when are you planning to support RH 5?

I am trying to figure out which system to install on my computer. My university provides us with RH3,4 and 5. What distro should i choose so i will have no problems? I do not want to spend time on tweaking and changing sources written by NI, because i've got more important things to do.

Please, do not offer me to use Win%%%ws.

Thanks

[ninevoltz]

I believe that NI only supports RHEL 3 and 4, meaning you shouldn't have to tweak anything. RHEL 5 will most likely require tweaking.

[tereshkosg]

The sad thing is that NI gladly supports Windows Vista which is relatively new operating system, but still does not support RH5. That explains company priorities at the moment. I understand that you concentrate your efforts on something that brings you money. But still, nearsightedness of NI is obvious, Linux gets more and more popular in the computer users community for many simple reasons. Support, like this, does not do any good to the image of the company.

Just because i do not have much of a choice at the moment i will use the elder version of RH4. In future i will know , before bying anything from NI, first i will consider another DAQ manufacturers, who provide drivers support for linux.

Cheers

[tereshkosg]

note for NI: NVIDIA support is the example to follow.

Better linux support than that just does not exist.

[shoneill]

Doesn't NVidia offer binary blobs?

NVidia ships, oh, millions of graphics cards each year in a variety of areas.  NI ships, oh, thousands of DAQ cards a year (might be many thousand, but I doubt millions).

Economics of scale.  NVidia can afford to invest lots into drivers for Linux.  Plus the amount of workstations which DON'T RUN WINDOWS make it almost a requirement to have *nix drivers.

Vista is the first OS from Microsoft for years.

RH5 is an OS from a single linux provider.  What about Mandriva, SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian and so on.  And how often are the updated?

Again, economics of scale.  The market is strongly fragmented.  Which distributions should be supported?

It's VERY expensive for companies to keep up to date with current Linux systems.  I agree that it's the future, but you have to be aware of the differences involved.  Open source drivers would be nice though.....

Shane.

Message Edited by shoneill on 04-03-2007 05:24 PM

[Neil_S.]

From the NI perspective, I agree with Shane.  We have not ignored the growing popularity of Linux, but the reality is that almost all of our user base is still using Windows.  While ideally we would love to support every distro out there this is not really feasible.  Our individual customer's needs are very important but these needs must be balanced with the needs of our other stakeholders.  Placing more and more money into the development of drivers that will serve only a few will mean that the money will not go toward other projects which can have a bigger more important impact on our customers.  We strongly recommend that everyone continue to give us feedback since this is what will make our company better.  The discussion of Linux support is not over at NI but is an active dialog that continues to occur.  If our customers make a strong move toward Linux we will follow suit.

In the meantime for most other unsupported OSes and distros we recommend taking a look at our freely available Measurement Hardware Driver Development Kit.  The MHDDK provides tools to develop drivers in a number of different operating systems.  In fact, individuals have written drivers for OSes such as QNX, Mac OS X, and various Linux distros.

The MHDDK is available at http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/11737

Others have also started their own open source drivers for some of our hardware.  Possibly the most popular is Comedi that includes drivers for many of our more popular DAQ products.  (See http://www.comedi.org)

Once again we greatly appreciate all feedback from our customers.  This thread as well as the Fedora Core 5 thread are extremely useful to both NI and many of our customers and are well known by many of our developers and support team.  We especially appreciate John's (ninevoltz) involvement in these threads.

Regards,

Neil S.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[tereshkosg]

Neil and Shane, thanks for replying.

I agree with you, and i were a stockholder of the company i would probably choose the same path as you have chosen. I understand that financing of the developement of a non-popular product does not make sense.

It is just very upsetting that money make some class of customers secondar.
But i can not blame NI, you guys have your own families to feed 🙂

Anyways, could you please specify on your website in the driver section, what systems support these drivers, instead of writing just Linux.

Otherwise it will be like with me - two days's been wasted on nothing.

Thanks

[shoneill]

Neil,

I did not know about the open source drivers.  I think NI really needs to get that information out a bit more prominently.  This is something which could really be embraced by the community here.  I for one am playing with the idea of going "over" to linux soon, but things like no DAQmx are putting obstacles in my way.

As to what it needs before the mainstream changes.... well it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation.  People don't change until there's enough support, and companies don't support it until it's commercially viable.  Both points of view are valid and acceptable.

As to "The discussion of Linux support is not over at NI but is an active dialog that continues to occur" I should certainly hope so.  Especially when Vista looks to be somewhat slow on the uptake.  MS betting the farm on DRM in the OS just before major music companies start doing away with DRM may cost them in the end.  And with Vista, we again have a more complicated OS ecosystem (32-bit, 64-bit).

For the moment I'm staying with XP, but I'll probably indulge in a computer running linux.  Now I have to work out a deal with NI so that my Win and Linux versions of LV don't cost me an arm and a leg 😛

Shane.

[Hubert G]

Hi all

I am installing NIDAQmx 8 on kernel 2.6.20 and I can tell you that the modpost problem is still here... I modified the modpost.c... Next for the INIT_WORK problem, I fixed it by deleting the data pointer &paramBlock in the INIT_WORK process :
- nNIKAL100_mInitWorkQueue( &workQueue, nNIKAL100_launchThread);
- nNIKAL100_mInitWorkQueue((nNIKAL100_tWorkQueue*)(kalURB->control.osWorkItem), nNIKAL100_usbClearHaltSynchronous);
the updateNIDriver is successful now but no way to make a program run : the program and linux freeze, can't kill process, need to reboot !
I am using a PCI-6034e. Don't thing is important...
Do you have some news since your last post on 03-20-2007 ?

Hubert