NI Offline Help Viewer is Crashing on My Linux Installation

Issue Details

Users have reported that the NI Offline Help Viewer crashes or fails to launch on various Linux distributions. This issue affects installations on OpenSUSE Leap, RHEL, and Ubuntu systems. The crash may occur immediately upon launch, or the viewer may open without displaying any content.

Solution

To mitigate the issue, follow the steps below based on your Linux distribution:

For OpenSUSE Leap 15.5 and 15.6

1. Open a terminal.
2. Create the required directory:
   1. sudo mkdir -p /var/local/offline-help-viewer
3. Launch the Offline Help Viewer manually as a non-root user:
   1. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer --no-sandbox
4. If no content is visible, import it manually:
   1. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer /usr/share/doc/ni-labview-offline-manual/labview_enus.zcp
   2. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer /usr/share/doc/ni-labview-offline-manual/labview-api-ref_enus.zcp

For RHEL 8, RHEL 9, and Ubuntu 22.04

1. Launch the Offline Help Viewer manually as a non-root user:
   1. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer --no-sandbox
2. If no content is visible, import it manually:
   1. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer /usr/share/doc/ni-labview-offline-manual/labview_enus.zcp
   2. /opt/NI\ Offline\ Help\ Viewer/ni-offline-help-viewer /usr/share/doc/ni-labview-offline-manual/labview-api-ref_enus.zcp

Additional Information

• LabVIEW Offline Help is not supported on Ubuntu 24.04 as of July 9, 2025.
• Due to recurring issues, it is not recommended to use the NI Offline Help Viewer on Linux distributions at this time.