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Why Do I Get Segmentation Fault Errors When Installing LabVIEW 7.1 and Earlier on Linux?

Primary Software:
Primary Software Version: 7.1
Primary Software Fixed Version: 7.1.1
Secondary Software: LabVIEW Development Systems

Problem:
When installing LabVIEW 7.1 or earlier on Fedora Core 2, Mandrake, or another Linux distribution, I receive the following message:

segmentation fault: LabVIEW caught fatal signal 7.0 - Received SIGSEGV.
Reason: address not mapped to object

Solution:
Note: The issue described in this document is resolved in the LabVIEW 7.1.1 Maintenance Release.

This same segmentation fault error will also occur if trying to install LabVIEW for Linux on a 64-bit machine. LabVIEW is not supported on any 64-bit systems unless there is a 32-bit mode that can be used.  Please verify that this is not a 64-bit system before using the suggested method below.

Mandrake, Fedora Core 2, and various other Linux distributions use a newer directory indexing feature on their filesystems, which causes the "." and ".." entries to not always be first in the file list. LabVIEW 7.1 and earlier relies on this behavior.  This behaviour can be verified by executing ls -af from the terminal.

In order to resolve this issue, you can change this behavior on each of the Linux ext3 partitions.  To do this, run the following command as root:

tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/yourpartition

You will want to change /dev/yourpartition to the name of the ext3 partition that needs to be changed.  You can find out the partition(s) by running mount. An example of the data returned from the mount command is listed below:

linux$ mount
/dev/hdb2 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts
(rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
usbfs on /proc/bus/usb type usbfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type
binfmt_misc (rw)

In the above example, the only ext3 partition is /dev/hdb2.  In this case, you would execute:

tune2fs -O ^dir_index /dev/hdb2

Once you have done this, you should immediately be able to use LabVIEW.  This process changes a flag on the filesystem, and should (but might not always) be persistent between reboots.