I have Ubuntu 20.04. The LabVIEW Community Version for Linux isn't natively designed to be run on Ubuntu. How do I install it?
16 Answers
Note: This is a copy of answer from new OP question, Ask for removal if he/she posted his/her answer.
1Starting of, you will have to download the ISO file from the official National Instruments site:
Once the ISO file is downloaded, extract the files within it wherever you want.
Now, as mentioned earlier, as far as 2020 SP1 version, LabVIEW isn't supported for Ubuntu, the files within the extracted folder are
.rpm, which, on itself won't install well most likely. This means you need to turn the.rpmfiles to.deb, if you have never done this, it is rather simple, you need to install Alien (in case you don't have it installed), in the terminal this command should get the job done:
sudo apt-get install alienOnce you have Alien installed, in your terminal, go to the folder where you extracted all the files from the ISO, once there, you'll perform the
.rpmto.debconversion:
sudo alien *.rpm --scriptsThis will convert ALL
.rpmfiles to.deb, more precisely, it will create all the corresponding.debfiles without deleting the.rpmones, don't worry about the latter, they will be ignored in the rest of the process.Once the alien command ends, it is time to install the files, to do so, run the next command:
sudo dpkg -i *.debWhen you do it all the
.debfiles will be installed.Here is where the real mess began when I performed this process, the installed files should be in:
/usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2020-64(The last direction may vary as this post gets older, but you should find that folder in/usr/local/natinst.I encountered some problems at this stage, because i tried to execute the ``labviewcommunity file with:
./labviewcommunityYet, when doing so, I got an error message, sorry if I cant give you the details on the precise error, don't have record of it, but I found a solution online:
In case you have problems with that solution, what I did was, downloaded this file:
And when you extract its content, the initial folder is named usr, you'll have to copy and paste all the contents from this file into your usr folder in exactly the same folders as they appear on the tar file.
Once you do this, labviewcommunity ran, it asked me to log in, and when I did so, Firefox told me that i was authenticated but LabVIEW said that the authentication process had failed. I got stuck trying too much, until just to see what happened, I decided to try a file named
labviewprofullwith:
./labviewprofullAnd to my surprise, this worked, it opened a fully functional LabVIEW.
To create a desktop file in order to open LabView from your desktop, you can create an empty file in the text editor, and put in this:
Type=Application Terminal=false Exec=env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2020-64 /usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2020-64/labviewprofull Icon=/usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2020-64/etc/desktop/icons/labview.pngDon't forget to change the Icon location to wherever you have the file for the Icon of LabVIEW.
Having done so, save this file in your desktop as LabVIEW.desktop, right click on it and select Allow Launching. This should allow you to have LabVIEW community on Ubuntu. Don't forget to comment in case you have some problems, see if either me or someone can help.
I hope this turns out to be useful to someone else, good luck ;)
I have installed labview for Linux using Ubuntu, and there is a script provided for installing the rpms. There is no need to convert the rpms to deb.
Once you have mounted the LabView.iso, cd into the Linux distribution. There you will find a ./bin/INSTALL.norpms script.
This script is documented, but poorly.
Here is an example of how I installed an rpm file:
cd ./STATIC/LabVIEW^---- this was my working folder for LabVIEW
mkdir /usr/local/natinst/
chmod 755 /usr/local/natinst/Install packages (.rpm) files, Working Example:
sudo ./bin/INSTALL.norpm labview-2020-desktop-20.0.0-1.x86_64.rpmTo verify:
ls -lta /usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2020-64/etc/desktop/*I would say this is an undocumented but huge simplification of the install to Ubuntu.
2Thanks for the very helpful instruction to the one who answered first!
It works very fine!
One think I would at is:
It is possible that you have to convert some packages (i386) at first in tgz and in the next step to deb
For me was this a help:
I changed to the mounted iso-directory and typed:
sudo ./bin/INSTALL.norpm labview-2020-profull-exe-20.5.0.49152-0+f0.x86_64.rpmThis installed the labviewprofull, which is automatically symbolic linked to labview -> no further thing to be done.labview can now be started as an application.
I followed the above instructions with this command sequence in the decompressed directory:
sudo rm *i386*
sudo alien *.rpm --scripts -k
sudo dpkg -i *.debI got these errors in response to the dpkg command:
Errors were encountered while processing: niexfinder-base_1.0-59_all.deb niexfinder-exe_1.0-59_amd64.deb niexfinder-labview-2021_21.0.0-1_all.deb niexfinder-lib-2021_21.0.0-1_amd64.debNevertheless, when I entered the command:
/usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2021-64/labviewprofullLabVIEW started up, and I was able to create projects, and VIs. I do not yet know how significant those errors will be.
My OS is Ubuntu 20.04
1I have Ubuntu 20.04. I downloaded the LabVIEW 2021 Community Edition for Linux, which came packaged as an .iso file full of .rpm files.
After reading all the previous answers thoroughly, I wanted to believe in the ./bin/INSTALL.norpms solution, so I tried it. I immediately ran into several problems. First, the INSTALL.norpms script itself was buggy:
rob@machine:/media/rob/2021LVLinPro$ sudo ./bin/INSTALL.norpm labview-2021-community-exe-21.0.0.49262-0+f110.x86_64.rpm
./bin/INSTALL.norpm: 23: /media/rob/2021LVLinPro/./bin/rpm2cpio: not found
/media/rob/2021LVLinPro/./bin/cpio: premature end of archive
./bin/INSTALL.norpm: 25: /media/rob/2021LVLinPro/./bin/rpmq: not foundAs you can see, the script is looking for executables in an invalid folder path that includes /./ in the middle of the path. There is a simple work-around for that one: instead of referring to the script itself with the "." shortcut for the current folder, specify the complete path the long way.
This led right away to another problem:
rob@machine:/media/rob/2021LVLinPro$ sudo /media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/INSTALL.norpm labview-2021-community-21.0.0.49262-0+f110.x86_64.rpm
/media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/INSTALL.norpm: 23: /media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/rpm2cpio: not found
/media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/cpio: premature end of archive
/media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/INSTALL.norpm: 25: /media/rob/2021LVLinPro/bin/rpmq: not foundThe computer was saying that it couldn't find rpm2cpio and rpmq in the bin folder. I checked, and sure enough, there were executable files right there where they were supposed to be. That was a head-scratcher! After doing some web research, I discovered that that is the error one gets when trying to execute programs that are unable to find dynamic libraries that the executables depend upon. Hmmm....
So I did some more research, and found a wonderful article that explains what dynamically-linked libraries are, and how to find the dependencies of an executable file. I put what I'd learned to the test:
rob@machine:~/Downloads/robtest/bin$ file rpm2cpio
rpm2cpio: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, stripped
rob@machine:~/Downloads/robtest/bin$ ldd rpm2cpio linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7fcb000) librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf7fa4000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7f81000) libz.so.1 => not found libbz2.so.1 => not found libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf7d92000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7fcd000)
rob@machine:~/Downloads/robtest/bin$ file rpmq
rpmq: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.2.5, stripped
rob@machine:~/Downloads/robtest/bin$ ldd rpmq linux-gate.so.1 (0xf7f4f000) librt.so.1 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/librt.so.1 (0xf7f28000) libpthread.so.0 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libpthread.so.0 (0xf7f05000) libz.so.1 => not found libbz2.so.1 => not found libc.so.6 => /lib/i386-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0xf7d16000) /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xf7f51000)To summarize what I discovered, the ./bin/INSTALL.norpms script uses some executable files, programs, which National Instruments distributes in the ./bin folder next to the INSTALL.norpms script. I had a look at two of these programs, rpm2cpio and rpmq which were distributed as "bare" executable files, and I discovered that they are 32-bit executables that depend on several dynamic libraries, but two of those libraries, libz.so.1 and libbz2.so.1, aren't installed on my system.
National Instruments was trying to do those of us with non-Red Hat distributions a favor by including a quick-and-dirty method of installing .rpm files, but their solution was to include a buggy script that calls programs distributed as "bare" 32-bit executables that depend on libraries they don't distribute.
Sigh. This is why Linux software is distributed as packages rather than bare executables, so that the package manager can ensure that the software that we'd like to install has all the dependencies that it needs.
My system is 64-bit. I could install 32-bit architecture, update my system to download dozens of i386 packages, and figure out what additional packages I need to install to get those two missing libraries, and then maybe it would work. But the more I learn, the less I like this quick-and-dirty approach, which is getting dirtier by the moment, and is not at all quick. This is turning into real work! So I decided to give up this approach and use Alien to convert the .rpm files to .deb files instead, so that is what I did. My experience was very similar to the one in the community wiki answer. That was so much easier, and it didn't take very long.
My advice to anyone who is wondering how to install LabVIEW Community Edition 2021 on a Ubuntu computer is to convert the .rpm files to .deb files, and install those, as described in the community wiki answer. If you're skeptical and you want to try the ./bin/INSTALL.norpms method, great; maybe it will work perfectly for you. But if you have problems, don't say that I didn't warn you.
