Specifications

University of Hertfordshire
40
Internet.
The following are the achievements:

Comparison and selection of Operating System, programming language, GPIB card and
GPIB driver.

The GPIB Card has been installed and configured properly.

The Spectrum Analyser can be fully controlled on the Linux (server). Any commands can be
send to the Spectrum Analyser by using sgpib commands, and the results can be received.

The server program has been developed by using TCP/IP socket programming, it can wait
for the client’s requests, send command to the Spectrum Analyser and send the results back
to the remote client.
8.3 Problems and Solutions
Problem 1, no right to install the sgpib driver.
To protect files and system, users in Linux are in some particular groups, and each group has
particular permissions. The SuperUser named root, the user who install the Linux system, has right
to do everything, The Author was allocated an account in users group, using that account, the
author has no right to so much things on Linux, such as to install any drivers, to copy files into root
folder, etc.
Solution: ask lab assistant for root password. Or change account into root group.
Problem 2, Linux cannot execute installation commands
For some unknown reasons, the installation commands in driver’s document cannot be executed in
SUSE Linux System.
Solution: In practice, Author used the following commands to drive the GPIB Card. Then the card
can be used.
mkdir -p /lib/modules/$$REL/kernel/misc;
install -d -o root -g root -m 755 /lib/modules/$$REL/kernel/misc;