Maker Pro
Maker Pro

GPIB board drivers for Solaris

D

David Kirkby

Jan 1, 1970
0
Are there any freely available GPIB board drivers for Solaris using a
National Instruments PCI based GPIB board?

They are on the National Instruments web site

http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/w...F86256DD500004715?opendocument&node=132060_US

but are not free - in fact, the drivers at £395 are slightly more
expensive than the card itself!!

It seems I would need part# 778027-01.

Just wondering if anyone is aware of any other solutions? I only want
this for home use, so are not going to spend that sort of money on drivers.

Running Solaris 9 here.

Dr. David Kirkby
 
D

David Kirkby

Jan 1, 1970
0
J

John Larkin

Jan 1, 1970
0
Are there any freely available GPIB board drivers for Solaris using a
National Instruments PCI based GPIB board?

They are on the National Instruments web site

http://digital.ni.com/softlib.nsf/w...F86256DD500004715?opendocument&node=132060_US

but are not free - in fact, the drivers at £395 are slightly more
expensive than the card itself!!

It seems I would need part# 778027-01.

Just wondering if anyone is aware of any other solutions? I only want
this for home use, so are not going to spend that sort of money on drivers.

Running Solaris 9 here.

Dr. David Kirkby

RS-232 to GPIB boxes show up on ebay, usually cheap.

John
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
RS-232 to GPIB boxes show up on ebay, usually cheap.

John

Thanks for that. I don't need fast speed, so serial should do, but I'd
rather a direct GPIB solution if I can find one, but I am not going to
pay £395 for drivers. That seems to be taking the Mic a bit.
 
F

Frithiof Andreas Jensen

Jan 1, 1970
0
David Kirkby said:
but are not free - in fact, the drivers at £395 are slightly more
expensive than the card itself!!

There is a reason for avoiding Solaris whenever possible unless forced by
corporate rulez - in which case corporate can bloody well pay up!
 
C

Chris Eilbeck

Jan 1, 1970
0
David Kirkby said:
I should have added I want this for Solaris 9 SPARC not on x86,

Just use a crappy old PC, bung it on your network and run the
linux-gpib drivers on it. I wouldn't pay extra for drivers either.

Chris
 
C

Casper H.S. Dik

Jan 1, 1970
0
There is a reason for avoiding Solaris whenever possible unless forced by
corporate rulez - in which case corporate can bloody well pay up!

Well, it's the first time I've ever seen a hardware company charge
extra for the drivers.

Casper
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
Frithiof said:
There is a reason for avoiding Solaris whenever possible unless forced by
corporate rulez - in which case corporate can bloody well pay up!
I quite like Solaris so that in itself is no reason to "avoiding Solaris
whenever possible". I might be a case to not use Solaris in this
instance, but that is a very different issue.
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
Casper said:
Well, it's the first time I've ever seen a hardware company charge
extra for the drivers.

Casper

I don't think this is totally unknown in the Pee Cee world, as I think
some graphics cards manufactuers have been known to make a nominal
charge for Linux drivers, but a quick google could not find evidence of
this.

But NI are taking the **** a bit. This is not a "nominal charge" but
more than the cost of the hardware, as the NI card, with Windoze XP
drivers is £390. You can possibly buy the card with only Solaris drivers
for less than £390+£395=£785, but I have not checked that.
 
J

John Woodgate

Jan 1, 1970
0
But NI are taking the **** a bit. This is not a "nominal charge" but
more than the cost of the hardware, as the NI card, with Windoze XP
drivers is £390. You can possibly buy the card with only Solaris
drivers for less than £390+£395=£785, but I have not checked that.


Do you think some marketroid goofed and the £395 price is for card +
driver? It might be worth asking, if you can find an intelligent human
to speak to, however improbable that is.

I recall one UK company had a VCR listed for £2365 for three days before
someone noticed.
 
F

Frithiof Andreas Jensen

Jan 1, 1970
0
Dave said:
I quite like Solaris so that in itself is no reason to "avoiding Solaris
whenever possible". I might be a case to not use Solaris in this
instance, but that is a very different issue.

heh -

I hate Solaris, but OK, that is an irrational grudge from all the way back
from SUNOS and all the known bugs they refused to fix Then "because one
should "upgrade" to Solaris - which at that time did not even have
functional *Tools* - all the better to extract $$$$$$ for the "Support
Contract".

SUN would be nice IF they grew a Brain, but they are still too moneyed for
that ;-)
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
John said:
Do you think some marketroid goofed and the £395 price is for card +
driver?

No, it is definitely not an error.
It might be worth asking, if you can find an intelligent human
to speak to, however improbable that is.

I just phoned NI to confirm it and did get an intelligent human being -
I wish it was the same with my bank!!

I was quoted £790 for the GPIB board for Solaris - part number is
777462-01.

Interestingly, you can buy the Windoze card and Solaris drivers for a
total of £785, which is £5 less than you can buy the Solaris card with
Solaris drivers!

I'm 99.9% sure they are the same physical card. Data at
http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/1233

Oh, and by the way, an update from the previous version of the driver is
£235.

NI let you submit instrument drivers for Labview which is very generous
of them. I doubt they pay £395 for a driver - in fact, I doubt they pay
you at all, although I can't confirm that.

Does anyone know if you need a GPIB driver if you have Labview? We have
a license at work for Labview, on all platforms including Solaris. I
wonder if a GPIB driver would be needed then, or if Labview would
install its own.
 
S

Stuart Biggar

Jan 1, 1970
0
Casper said:
Well, it's the first time I've ever seen a hardware company charge
extra for the drivers.

Casper

Casper,

NI provides drivers for Windows and Linux and OS/X for free and
charges for Solaris (SPARC only) and a couple of other UNIX variants.

We use some of the NI GPIB-Ethernet devices in our optics lab.
Our software runs on SPARCs and hardware/software drivers have been
good under Solaris without the "fun" bluescreen crashes with Windows
(NT and later 2000) using the same software (Windows drivers from NI).
Later Windows drivers appear better (but not perfect). So maybe you
get what you pay for :)

Software stability is useful when you are running expensive and
very hard to replace hardware (NIST calibrated lamps, etc).

I would like to see Sun lobby NI for support of X86 Solaris for at
least their PCI-GPIB boards and the GPIB-Enet (Ethernet to GPIB)
boxes. I've made telephone and written requests without even an
answer ...

Stuart
 
M

Michael Vilain

Jan 1, 1970
0
"Frithiof Andreas Jensen"
heh -

I hate Solaris, but OK, that is an irrational grudge from all the way back
from SUNOS and all the known bugs they refused to fix Then "because one
should "upgrade" to Solaris - which at that time did not even have
functional *Tools* - all the better to extract $$$$$$ for the "Support
Contract".

SUN would be nice IF they grew a Brain, but they are still too moneyed for
that ;-)

You obviously never worked for a company that viewed customers as
revenue streams or had to make a profit. Can't sell more hardware?
What about this new OS upgrade? Why not charge for fixing bugs in the
old OS and make everyone use the new one? Genius!

There will be people kvetching about any decision a company makes,
regardless of what it is. Interesting that you still "have issues" with
Sun's decisions about SunOS 4 -> Solaris migration. Are there other
places in your life where you have trouble "letting go"?
 
R

Richard L. Hamilton

Jan 1, 1970
0
heh -

I hate Solaris, but OK, that is an irrational grudge from all the way back
from SUNOS and all the known bugs they refused to fix Then "because one
should "upgrade" to Solaris - which at that time did not even have
functional *Tools* - all the better to extract $$$$$$ for the "Support
Contract".

SUN would be nice IF they grew a Brain, but they are still too moneyed for
that ;-)

I wonder what part of the world you live in, that a company doesn't need
to make money to stay in business. Not that Sun has been doing so well
in that regard lately...
 
C

Clifford Heath

Jan 1, 1970
0
David said:
Are there any freely available GPIB board drivers for Solaris using a
National Instruments PCI based GPIB board?

Have you considered modifying the Linux driver for Solaris?
 
D

Dave

Jan 1, 1970
0
Clifford said:
Have you considered modifying the Linux driver for Solaris?

I doubt I have the knowledge. I know nothing about the inertals of Linux
, or writing Solaris drivers.

Sure a free Solaris driver would be nice, but if there is not one, and I
can't get one free, then I will use an old PC and probably OpenBSD, as
someone has written some code for OpenBSD that controls the instrument I
want, and will be doing with it what I want to do.
 
C

Casper H.S. Dik

Jan 1, 1970
0
Michael Vilain said:
There will be people kvetching about any decision a company makes,
regardless of what it is. Interesting that you still "have issues" with
Sun's decisions about SunOS 4 -> Solaris migration. Are there other
places in your life where you have trouble "letting go"?

Yeah, I didn't want to go there. Blaming us for not fixing bugs in
SunOS 4.x how many years later?

Casper
 
J

John Woodgate

Jan 1, 1970
0
I read in sci.electronics.design that Casper H. S. Dik
Statements on Sun products included here are not gospel and may
be fiction rather than truth.

Actually very similar to gospel, then.
 
F

Frithiof Andreas Jensen

Jan 1, 1970
0
I wonder what part of the world you live in, that a company doesn't need
to make money to stay in business. Not that Sun has been doing so well
in that regard lately...

Entirely not bad enough, apparantly:

Just a few months ago I wanted to License i.e. Pay Money For the SUN Java
Distributed Management Toolkit, so I emailed the sales support on the
corporate web page, being in Denmark and all one would need the local
representative.

Guess What - No Reply!!

Manking an *extreme* effort and looking up a local subsidiary, phoning the
guys, iterating through many departments whoms responsibility it was not and
finally "being called back".

Well, No Call Back, must not be worth the USD 5000.
 
Top