Data Acquisition (DAQ) and Control from Microstar Laboratories

Knowledge Base: Platform

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Q10031 Does DAP software work with Linux?

Tags: Help, DAP, xDAP, DAPL, Linux, DAPIO, systems

Applies to: All DAP models and DAPL versions

I am considering a DAP application to run under the latest distro of Fedora GNU/Linux. Is the DAP support software compatible?

There is DAPIO software available that supports basic DAP programming but not direct device addressing across a network. Whether this will work for your system and Linux version we don't know. But there is a good chance that it will, with a little work.

DAP devices require driver software that runs at the loadable kernel module level. At this level, the Linux system is not very consistent from one release level to the next. Making the driver software work is not trivial. We provide DAPtools drivers that are supposed to be compatible with Linux kernel versions 2.6.x, but might require the compiler tools and system libraries that come with older distributions.

So far, the response from the Linux community has been between minimal. For this reason, there may or may not be Linux support in the future. For now, you might need to adopt the classic Linux attitude... if it doesn't work, fix the source code.

Some users have done exactly that — and contributed patches that should allow you to run DAP boards on most of the 2.6.xx kernel releases. Check the list of related topics for information about these patches.

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