NI-488.2 GPIB Driver for Linux/x86 (Beta Release 0.8.2) October 2001
Copyright (C) 1999-2001 National Instruments Corporation.
All Rights Reserved.

NOTE: This is a BETA release of the driver.
Please report problems or questions at http://www.ni.com/ask.

This driver supports National Instruments AT-GPIB/TNT, PCI-GPIB and
PCI-GPIB+ cards.  It may be used with the LabVIEW GPIB or NI488.2
primitives or called from C by linking your program with libgpib.a.

See the file README.PNP if you are using an ISA Plug-and-Play AT-GPIB/TNT
card for information on configuring your card which should be done prior
to installing this driver.

This driver does NOT support the PCII, PCII/a, or PCMCIA-GPIB cards.
At the present time, no support is planned for these cards under Linux.
If PCMCIA support is integrated into the mainstream Linux 2.4 kernel
release, PCMCIA-GPIB support will be reconsidered at that time.

REQUIREMENTS:

This driver requires a stable Linux 2.0.x, 2.2.x, or 2.4.x series kernel with
loadable modules support enabled.

In order to work on a wide variety of kernel versions and configurations,
a portion of the driver is distributed as source which will be compiled by
the installer to match your current kernel version.  You must have
gcc-2.7.2 or egcs-1.0.1 or later and the module utilities installed
on your system to proceed with installation.

Also, the kernel source include files matching the kernel you are running
must be installed.  On some systems, these will match the system include 
files (/usr/include) which are installed by default.  On RedHat 7.0 and
later systems, you must install the kernel-source package to get the
correct include files.  This package can be safely removed after successful
driver installation.

To install (as root), run

  ./INSTALL

and follow the instructions.

You may then use ibconf to configure the driver, ibtsta to test the
installation of the driver (with no GPIB cable attached), and ibic to
interactively send NI-488.2 commands to GPIB devices.

DOCUMENTATION:

A full manual describing the NI-488.2 API, ibconf and other GPIB utilities
for Unix systems is available in Adobe Acrobat format at:

  ftp://ftp.ni.com/support/gpib/linux/ni488m-320351b.pdf

Visit http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html to download
a free Adobe Acrobat viewer for Linux.


FILES
-----
README 		- this file
README.PNP	- information for AT-GPIB/TNT Plug-and-Play card users
INSTALL		- NI-GPIB for Linux Installation script
ugpib.h		- Header file needed for user GPIB/NI-488.2 C programs
cib.o		- Precompiled GPIB interface for linking with C applications
libgpib.a	- Library built from cib.o
ibconf		- NI-488 driver configuration utility.
		  NOTE: If you run this utility on ib_ni.o, you can change
		  settings permanently for all future installations of the
		  driver for new kernel versions.
ibtsta		- Simply diagnostic program to verify correct operation
ibic		- GPIB Interactive Control program; allows you to interactively
		  send GPIB commands to a device
static/		- subdirectory containing statically linked versions of
		  ibconf, ibtsta, and ibic for use with older systems without
		  glibc 2.x support.

Other files:
cib.c		- Source for C language interface to GPIB driver
cib.h		- Header file for cib.c
ib_linux.[hc]	- Linux OS-specific portion of the driver, recompiled by
		  install script to support Linux kernel upgrades without
		  requiring re-release of driver
ib_ni.o		- Platform-independent UNIX GPIB driver interface

The files ibconf.h, ib_ni.h, ib_linux.h, ib_linux.c, ib_ni.o and the Makefile
are needed to rebuild/relink the driver during installation.
