July 2023
This file contains installation instructions and compatibility information for NI-VISA 2023 Q3.
You can find more release information on ni.com.
NI-VISA software for the Linux/x86 64-bit architecture has been tested on the following distributions:
NI-VISA requires a 64-bit distribution and does not support 32-bit applications.
Visit NI Hardware and Software Operating System Compatibility and NI-VISA Features and OS Compatibility pages to view supported operating systems for different releases and feature support for various operating systems.
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.
The ni-visa-labview-support package supports applications using NI-VISA with LabVIEW 2022 or later. When installing NI-VISA, this package will be recommended if you have already installed LabVIEW 2022 or later and installs to the LVAddons directory.
LVAddons directory location: /usr/local/natinst/share/lvaddons
Use a web browser to view the NI-VISA documentation by searching NI-VISA at ni.com/docs.
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.
By installing the NI-VISA LabVIEW support, LabVIEW examples will be located in the LabVIEW examples directory.
NI-VISA 2023 Q3 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