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Re: LabVIEW and Linux - Intro

swatts
Active Participant

Hello Angry Masses, 

When I'm not marching on Castle FrankensteNI with a pitchfork in one hand I have been looking at installing LabVIEW and NI-VISA on Linux to play with our Pico hardware.

More of my customers/jobs are wanting to use LabVIEW with Linux. As part of our Community Training Initiative we need to load LabVIEW and Drivers onto Linux, and the experience wasn't seamless. But the results were really impressive after a bit of work.

 

So here I we will go through various different distros and see what the install experience and performance is like on VM and on a tiny old computer.

 

For this series of articles I will be installing the distro, LabVIEW 2023Q3 and NI-VISA on a Virtual Machine in Virtualbox and on a Lenovo SFF (Lenovo Thinkcentre M72e Tiny i3-3220T 8GB RAM 120GB SSD. 2.80GHz, the CPU was first seen in 2011!).

 

The Intel i3-3220T has a PassMark average score of 1933

Compared to the CPU on a LattePanda 3 Delta 864 which has an Intel N5105 with a PassMark average score 4066

It should give an idea about how weedy a system I'm testing on.

 

I will then test how LabVIEW looks and feels using our CTI stuff and I will then try loading a larger program and see how that works. I will also try and explain the various package managers and commands and what they are doing as I found the documentation was heavy on cutting and pasting and light on the why!

 

I will try and video the screen for the various distros and the install process for LabVIEW and drivers as I go along.

 

Georgios Tsalavoutis has been doing a lot of this work too, so I might push my material onto his blog (if he wants) and just link them from here.

 

Finally I'm trying out a tool called Ventoy, that allows you to have various distros (ISO files) on a flash drive and they come up as bootable images...

 

Caveat: I am not an expert in Linux, this is written from the perspective of what I learn as I go through my Linux journey. If I make mistakes, please point them out in a non-Linux support way  ("why would you do that!, you obviously don't know what you're doing")and more in a LabVIEW way ("what are you trying to achieve, here's some options and why they might work"). 

 

So to get the ball rolling, let's look at Ventoy and run through how it works.

 

It can be found here.

 

https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html

 

and according to their website it is an open source tool to create a bootable USB drive. In practice it's a drive you drop ISOs onto and these will come up as bootable options when you hardware boots up. It's magic!

 

From their downloads page I downloaded ventoy-1.0.96-windows.zip (if you are from the future your numbers may be bigger)

It goes through the sourceforge page so apologies for that!

 

Extract it and you will see the following 

 

swatts_0-1704798834482.png

 

Now plug in a nice new and big USB drive.

Double Click on Ventoy2Disk.exe

swatts_2-1704799450786.png

It seems to find the USB OK, press [Install].

The drive will be formatted and then it acts as a normal drive (actually 2 normal drives, but ignore the second drive), but when you drop ISOs onto it they magically become bootable.

 

As a demo I dropped Rocky Linux onto it, (It's on the I:Drive because I had already downloaded Rocky on another computer and it has a lot of drives)

 

VentoyRocky.png

Now all you have to do is plug it into the lil Lenovo and it should try to boot it up (I'll use my fully loaded Ventoy drive to show how it looks with some more ISOs loaded)

 

VentoyMenu.jpg

 

As you can see you can just select the ISO from the bootable device. Very nice indeed.

 

The next article will likely be loading Rocky Linux and LabVIEW on my lil Lenovo and some performance tests.

After that it will be how to do it on Virtualbox and VMWare.

 

Then we'll check out some other distros, rinse and repeat.

 

Happy New Year!

Steve


Opportunity to learn from experienced developers / entrepeneurs (Fab,Joerg and Brian amongst them):
DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshop


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Comments
Taggart
Trusted Enthusiast

You put me onto Ventoy a few weeks ago. Very good stuff.

 

A note though, the proxmox iso will not work from within Ventoy. It boots into the proxmox installer but then complains.

 

 

Sam Taggart
CLA, CPI, CTD, LabVIEW Champion
DQMH Trusted Advisor
Read about my thoughts on Software Development at sasworkshops.com/blog
GCentral
Dhakkan
Member

TL; DR: LabVIEW directly on Linux? Lovely! Consider starting with an NI supported distribution. Even if a distribution is 'based' off one supported by NI, the choices made by the distribution developer can affect your experience.

 

I had rough patches in my last round of effort 3+ years ago with LV2020. Your mileage will likely vary.

 

First, I couldn't get VIPM going, as the 2020 equivalent was released yet. Second, I naively thought that LabVIEW's feature of separate compiled code from VIs would easily permit me to develop in Linux and build in Windows. This led to so many LV crashes in Windows that I gave up. As long as you don't intend cross-porting the source code, you should be OK. Now, I just run LabVIEW only on Windows.

 

I used Easy2Boot from an external SSD, with various images saved as ISO in a different partition within the SSD. (Hadn't heard of Ventoy back then.) This made it easy to maintain my SSD as the primary source of live-booting or installing different OSes, not just the Linux distributions.

 

I continue to use Linux (OpenSUSE Tumbleweed) as my daily driver. I tried using KVM/Virtio to run Windows in a VM. While the VM was very responsive, I had trouble with mapping my linux partitions - the one approach that worked for me required me to use my physical ethernet adapter. Now, I use VirtualBox to a degree of success, even though it is just a tad sluggish.

 

The Linux options are aplenty. For making your journey a relatively pleasant one, you may wish to start with the initial set of distributions officially supported by NI. Otherwise, not only do you have to contend with distributions, but you also need to look at desktop environments (KDE, GNOME, XFCE, etc., etc.), native drivers for your GPU (this alone can make or break your experience of a distribution), and X11 vs Wayland for display, among other things.

 

And, yes, Happy 2024 - the year of the Linux Desktop? 🙂

swatts
Active Participant

So far OpenSuse has been the most straight-forward... but I'll record the process warts and all.

Steve


Opportunity to learn from experienced developers / entrepeneurs (Fab,Joerg and Brian amongst them):
DSH Pragmatic Software Development Workshop


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