Need to deploy application to Solaris users

[Agu]

Hi everyone,

The project I am working on has two parts. Part 1 is data acquisition on a Solaris system. Part 2, number crunching, done already in Labview on Windows (at least, until now).

The problem I hope you can help me with is with part 2. My internal customers get the rash when Windows is mentioned (they are old school, UNIX command-line intensive, engineers, who the only VI they know about, is the popular UNIX 'vi' text editor). I would like to port the number crunching and nice plots that Labview provides into Solaris, to keep them happy.

I could come up with these options, which implies reuse of my existing Laview code (with some minor changes maybe):

1) Get and older Solaris Labview with application builder, so I can deploy the program to the end users... can I get it? if so, how?

2) Get a current Linux version and test it on Solaris... since Linux and Unix are so similar, I am guessing there is some hope on this. Has anyone tried this before? any opinion on this approach (maybe you are 100% positive it's worth a try, or 100% positive it won't work)?

3) I have the Internet Tookit. Reading (a little) about it, it sounds there is a way to "see" a running VI on a PC through a web browser running on another machine (only front panel). If this is true, I could potentially run my VI on Windows, and have my Windows-allergic users see the plots via a browser. Is this possible? if not, is there something similar I can do?

4) My current solution, if none of above work, would be to deploy a Windows executable (have them get over their allergy) and have it installed on a remote PC, which can be accessed using VNC. The VI would get the data (generated in part 1, under Solaris) through the network, from a UNIX path (using FTP or simple Windows drive mapping through a Samba server).

I would appreciate comments about my options, and/or new options/ideas.

Thanks a lot!

PS: currently using Solaris 10, and Labview 8.2 for Windows

[vugie]

I'm not an expert on this topic, just have few thoughts and googled little bit.

AFAIK Linux and Solaris are not directly binary compatible, so the only way to run LV natively would be to have sources... just dreaming... but there are some methods to run linux binaries. I have no idea how it would work for runtime engine with all that shared libraries, etc.

Another option would be http://www.winehq.org/ - a framework(?), or set of libraries(?) which allow for running Windows program on POSIX systems. Already impressive number of Windows programs are reported to work with Wine so maybe LV RTE will do. The only trials I heard of concerned Development Environment - reported here (6.2 worked 7.0 not). And you have to compile Wine your self (it is doable). There is also commercial fork of Wine - Bordeaux for Solaris ($25). Actually it is for OpenSolaris - I don't know this matters.

Next option (and in my opinion most promising) would be Windows (or Linux) virtual machine - clean and small with few shared resources, just for RTE and your application which would run from autostart.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I'm not an expert on this topic, just have few thoughts and googled little bit.

AFAIK Linux and Solaris are not directly binary compatible, so the only way to run LV natively would be to have sources... just dreaming... but there are some methods to run linux binaries. I have no idea how it would work for runtime engine with all that shared libraries, etc.

Another option would be http://www.winehq.org/ - a framework(?), or set of libraries(?) which allow for running Windows program on POSIX systems. Already impressive number of Windows programs are reported to work with Wine so maybe LV RTE will do. The only trials I heard of concerned Development Environment - reported here (6.2 worked 7.0 not). And you have to compile Wine your self (it is doable). There is also commercial fork of Wine - Bordeaux for Solaris ($25). Actually it is for OpenSolaris - I don't know this matters.

Next option (and in my opinion most promising) would be Windows (or Linux) virtual machine - clean and small with few shared resources, just for RTE and your application which would run from autostart.

Stock Wine has not very well support for building under Solaris. The problem here is not that it can't be done but Wine is a moving target and its main development is obviously Linux based. There are only very few and sparse developers working on Wine for Solaris and the patches for that coming to Wine are very few.

LabVIEW 7.x most likely would run nowadays on Wine, since the tests you mention are very old and at a time when Wine was still considered in its infancy despite its age of more than 10 years back then .

Running Linux Apps under Solaris seems to me like an exercise in vain.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Adam Kemp]

Linux and Solaris are not the same, and binaries from one are not compatible with binaries from the other. If they refuse to accept a Windows application then maybe you could just convince them to accept a Linux application. I see no reason to use Solaris, unless they specifically require that you use Solaris. I don't know why anyone would do that, though.

EDIT: Another option that's better than VNC (though still somewhat silly) is to run the app on Linux remotely using X Windows. Solaris's GUI is X Windows, and that natively supports running remote apps and having them display locally. It's a much better experience than VNC because the windows look native to your current desktop (they float around and can be moved and resized normally, rather than all being forced into a single box).

This is as simple as something like this:

solarisbox:~$ ssh -X username@linuxboxPassword: (enter password)linuxbox:~: /path/to/labview

Once you've logged in with SSH and told it to forward X stuff (using -X or -Y) then you can just run LabVIEW or any LabVIEW app (or any other X app, for that matter) on the remote machine and have it appear on the local machine's display. It's wonderful.

[crelf]

...they are old school, UNIX command-line intensive, engineers, who the only VI they know about, is the popular UNIX 'vi' text editor...

Ha! jeff_plotzke and I had to update a config file on a customer UUT that runs on qnx - I was embarrassed that I had to look up the vi keyboard commands

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Ha! jeff_plotzke and I had to update a config file on a customer UUT that runs on qnx - I was embarrassed that I had to look up the vi keyboard commands

Well I once was fairly fluent in vi commands but if I sometimes happen to get in that mode nowadays, I look pretty silly. Talk about a non intuitive edit flow!

Rolf Kalbermatter

[crelf]

Well I once was fairly fluent in vi commands but if I sometimes happen to get in that mode nowadays, I look pretty silly. Talk about a non intuitive edit flow!

Let's just say that ":q!" was out most-often used command