I wasn't sure where to drop this topic (Hardware >> Macintosh, or is it Windows-related? ), so apologies if it's in the wrong spot....

I saw this thread about running LabVIEW on the new Intel-based MacBooks, but I have a different question. Has anyone booted Windows on these machines and tried to run Windows LabVIEW?

There are basically two ways to boot Windows on the MacBooks. One is to dual-boot, and the other is to run a virtualization solution (like something from Parallels).

I'm imagining that LabVIEW itself might run fine in at least one of those scenarios (as long as Windows is happy, which reports indicate it is), but I'd be more concerned about NI-DAQ.

Any experiences? Any hypotheses? Any brave souls want to give me a bag of money to buy a MacBook with so I can carry out this daring expriment... for the good of the community and all?

Justin

I think it won't work even for LV. Your LabVIEW package is not only dependant on the hardware platform, but also on the operating system. A MAC-LV (even an Intel-MAC-LV) has different interfaces (eg. display-, event-, keyboard-interface) to the OS than a Win-LV.

There is a good chance that the dual boot would work and some virtualization solutions (but definitely not everyone) might work too. However don't expect anything other than TCP/IP (and maybe serial but that is doubtful) to work for IO. NI-DAQ (and probably any other NI-XXXX hardware drivers) is simply out of question. It plugs deep into the Windows kernel to access the hardware and that part simply can't be virtualized properly enough to allow this to work.

Rolf Kalbermatter

I have been using Labview 8 and 8.2 on intel mac both in windows (bootcamp XP SP2) and OSX (10.4), running the compiled vi's on other machines (mac and win) with the 8.2 runtime engine (and the vi compiled on intel mac); no problems so far!
The mac-compiled runtime vi also works fine using Citrix with labview runtime engine, and I also have been using the NI USB 2008 hardware device (with NIDAQ) on both OS's on the intel mac (required some restarts before USB worked on win ;-)

For my own vi's I have not encountered any problems, your mileage may vary....

Paul.

I don't own a mac but a friend of mine does, he dual boots with boot camp.

I don't see how there would be any problems with running LabVIEW inside windows while on a mac. I mean windows doesn't know it's running on a mac, it just looks for an x86 architecture and drivers to control hardware, as long as it has these things I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I have been using a MacBook Pro (original Core Duo) without any problems. I will sometimes reboot into windows if I think I will be spending a lot of time doing LabVIEW development, but mostly I use Parallels. One thing I have noticed is that LabVIEW requires re-activation when you change from Parallels to bootcamp, assuming you are using your bootcamp partition with Parallels. I have seen no harwdware issues using USB devices under windows from bootcamp, I have not tried Parallels. If you want to use virtualization under Mac OS and use USB DAQ devices then VMware's Fusion (still in beta) would be a better bet, it supports all USB type transactions where Parallels has had some problems.