GPIB board drivers for Solaris

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

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

I should have added I want this for Solaris 9 SPARC not on x86,

writes:

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

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.

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

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

Casper

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"?

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.

writes:

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.

I read in sci.electronics.design that Dave wrote (in ) about 'GPIB board drivers for Solaris', on Wed, 27 Apr 2005:

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.

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 ;-)

No, it is definitely not an error.

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

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

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.

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...

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.

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

Casper

Have you considered modifying the Linux driver for Solaris?

I read in sci.electronics.design that Casper H. S. Dik wrote (in ) about 'GPIB board drivers for Solaris', on Thu, 28 Apr 2005:

Actually very similar to gospel, then.

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.