Install

Most readers probably have LabVIEW installed already, but if you don't, NI offers a free Community Edition that is perfect for learning. You can download it from NI's official website. Make sure to choose the 'Community' version, as others require a paid license. The Community Edition includes almost all the features of the Professional Edition, with the sole restriction that it cannot be used for commercial purposes.

To download it, you will need to create a free NI account by clicking 'Create an Account' in the top-right corner of the NI website. You will also use this account to activate the software after installation.

On Windows, installation is managed by the NI Package Manager (NIPM). When you run the installer, NIPM will ask you to select the components you want to install. For beginners, the default LabVIEW Core is sufficient. You can safely deselect additional hardware drivers (such as NI-DAQmx or NI-VISA) and specialized toolkits to save considerable disk space. After making your selections, follow the installation wizard to complete the setup, then log in with your NI account to activate the software.

Historically, LabVIEW supported macOS with an installer similar to the Windows version. However, please note that NI has discontinued macOS support in newer releases of LabVIEW. If you are using an older or legacy version of the Community Edition on Mac, you can install it using the standard .dmg package from the NI website.

For Linux, LabVIEW officially supports select distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. If you are on a supported distribution like Ubuntu, installation is straightforward: download the NI repository .deb file, install it, and then use the standard apt package manager to install LabVIEW natively.

If you are running an unsupported Debian-based distribution and only have access to the .rpm packages, you can convert them to .deb format using the alien package conversion tool.

First, install alien:

sudo apt-get install alien

Next, extract the downloaded LabVIEW installation package. Navigate to the rpm subdirectory and convert the packages to .deb format. Since some RPMs are for legacy 32-bit systems, you can delete any files containing i386 in their names before running:

sudo alien *.rpm --scripts

Finally, run the following command to install all the .deb packages:

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

LabVIEW will be installed in /usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-20xx-64 (where xx represents the version year). You can launch it by running ./labviewcommunity from that directory.

The start menu shortcut included in the installation package might not work out of the box on some Debian distributions:

Linux desktop shortcuts are stored in /usr/share/applications/. Find the file named labview64-20xx.desktop, open it in a text editor, and update the Exec line to: Exec=/usr/local/natinst/LabVIEW-2021-64/labviewcommunity %F. This will enable launching LabVIEW directly from your system's application menu.

While using an officially supported OS is critical for commercial work, troubleshooting these configurations is a great way to deepen your technical knowledge during the learning phase.

The LabVIEW 2021 startup screen looks like this, offering options to create a new file or open existing ones:

If you choose to start a new project, LabVIEW provides several templates to help you begin quickly: