January 2022
This file contains late breaking news about NI-VISA 21.5 for Linux and supersedes any information found in other documentation included in the distribution.
Refer to ni.com/linux for the most recent information about Linux support at National Instruments.
Refer to the NI-VISA release notes for known issues, bugs fixed since the last release, and other release details.
NI-VISA 21.5 for Linux has been tested on the following distributions:
NI-VISA 21.5 for Linux requires a 64-bit distribution and does not support 32-bit applications.
NI-VISA for Linux supports the following resource types and utilities:
NI-VISA 21.5 supports the 64-bit LabVIEW application development environment:
NI provides a repository add-on for all supported drivers that you can install using your Linux distribution's native package manager.
After the driver package(s) are installed, you must rebuild the new packages for the system kernel. NI recommends that you run the command 'dkms autoinstall' after installation, and before rebooting the system, to install the latest revision of all modules that have been installed for other kernel revisions. After doing so, the installed device drivers will function immediately on the next system start.
This release includes examples showing the use of NI-VISA in C and LabVIEW.
C examples are located in usr\share\doc\ni-visa\examples. Make files are provided that link to the necessary libraries.
The LabVIEW examples are located in the LabVIEW examples directory.
NI-VISA 21.5 for Linux does not support 32-bit versions of LabVIEW.
The VISA user must have write access to the file that represents the USB device, which is typically somewhere in a subdirectory within /dev/bus/usb. If this is not the case, the USB device is not accessible by VISA (it will not be found using viFindRsrc and viOpen will fail). The default configuration on most systems is that the 'root' user has write access; however, no other user has this access.
There are a number of options that you can take to provide a non-root user access to a USB device.
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ni-visa/usb/AddUsbRawPermissions.shFor more information about udev, please visit: kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev/udev.html
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