LabVIEW on Ubuntu!

Greetings LabVIEW friends,

Yesterday I decided to have another go at LabVIEW on Linux, to see if I could help make Antidoc compatible with Linux machines. I decided to use Ubuntu because it's compatible with LabVIEW and still fairly popular.

I started off with several failed attempts:

  1. I dug around for my old Raspberry Pi 2B+ which was running Ubuntu and I'd already installed LabVIEW on, but it looks like I must have left it at work before I got made redundant last year. 😕 RIP.
  2. I borrowed my fiancé's spare Pi 4B and put Ubuntu 22.04 LTS AMD64 on an SD card using Balena Etcher, but it wouldn't boot from it.
  3. I switched to Raspberry Pi Imager to prepare the SD card and got my Ubuntu up and running. Success! But when I went to install the LabVIEW 2023 Q4 package I realised the new Pis use ARM architecture and LabVIEW doesn't support that. Also explains why I didn't have any success with that AMD64 ISO...
  4. I decided to use Hyper-V to make myself a VM... nope, I am using Windows 11 Home Edition, which isn't suitable. Time to download VirtualBox.

Here are the steps that I have followed so far. As a Linux noob, I found I got stuck a few times so this is partly for my own reference!
  1. Installed VirtualBox and the Extensions Pack.
  2. Downloaded ubuntu-22.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso (because 22.04 is the latest version that I could find in the LabVIEW README),
  3. Made a VM using VirtualBox on my Windows 11 host machine: chose to give it 8GB RAM, 128GB Hard disk, 8 cores. Good thing that my new laptop has a fair amount of resources to share!
  4. Made an admin user called leah
  5. Downloaded LabVIEW 2024 Q3 Community Edition for Linux (because of the ability to save for previous versions easily). I don't trust 2025's stability yet...
  6. Opened terminal, did sudo apt update, sudo apt install ./ni-labview... , sudo apt search labview-2024, sudo apt install ni-labview-2024-community (watch out, it's easy to choose the wrong one there), restarted the VM.
  7. Ran LabVIEW
    Searching Linux apps for LabVIEW 2024
  8. Activated LabVIEW by logging into my ni.com account
  9. Installed Git: sudo apt install git-all
  10. Installed VIPM via vipm.io (thanks https://www.reddit.com/r/LabVIEW/comments/1gzdkpl/installing_and_configuring_vi_package_manager/ for the detailed instructions). Waited for it to download all of the packages.
    VIPM showing package list on Ubuntu


  11. Enabled VI Server and tested the connection.
    Dialogue saying 'VIPM successfully connected to LabVIEW 2024'
  12. Installed git cola with sudo apt-get install git-cola
  13. Gave some permissions to myself in my my natinst and vipm folders
  14. Installed asciidoc from vipm - despite the successful connection earlier, had to lanch LV manually within 120s as my VIPM doesn't launch Community Edition properly.
  15. To try and get shared clipboard working, downloaded the Guest Additions iso from https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.1.6/ following https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch04.html#additions-linux
    Did uname -r to find that my system was 6.8.0-52-generic. So I did sudo apt install linux-headers-generic
    Then
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install gcc
    sudo apt install build-essential
    Then mounted the iso, run, restart. Clipboard now works!
  16. Made a snapshot in case I want to reset the machine back to this state, e.g. for the next project.
Isn't Linux wonderful? Finding vi.lib was pretty much instantaneous when I typed it in the searchbar
Search bar showing VI.lib results on ubuntu

Anyway, wish me luck on my Linux quest!


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