Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Buliding GNU Radio on Gentoo Linux

[Johnathan Corgan]

Simon Alford wrote:

> I have just had and attempt at building and installing the latest GNU radio
> stable release on Gentoo Linux. It has all been pretty easy.
> 
> Got the source from SVN.
> 
> Emerged all the correct packages.
> 
> $ emerge swig fttw cppunit boost alsa-lib sdcc guile wxpython xmlto numpy
> 
> Then did the normal build.
> 
> $ ./bootstrap
> $ ./configure --exec-path=/usr/
> $ make
> $ make check
> $ make install
> 
> Make check passed all tests. (Easy peasy hey ;-)

It would be useful to document your efforts on our Wiki at:

http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki/GentooInstall

Use account name 'guest', password 'gnuradio'.

> The problem I now have, is when I try running any of the examples or usrp
> .py scripts I get "ImportError: No module named gnuradio".
> 
> How do I get python to find the gnuradio module? 

I'm not all that familiar with Gentoo, but three things have to happen
post install for USRP applications to work:

* The shared library loader needs to be able to find GNU Radio .so
files.  This may be as easy as re-running ldconfig, or you might have to
add something to /etc/ld.so.conf

* Python needs to know about the GNU Radio install.  The files will get
put into $prefix/lib/pythonX.X/site-packages/gnuradio, which is
typically already a place Python knows about, but you might have to set
PYTHONPATH to include that directory up to but not including the
'gnuradio' part. ($prefix is typically /usr/local)

* The USRP device file needs to have permissions altered for someone
besides root to be able to write to it.  If Gentoo uses udev then there
is a configuration directory under /etc you can drop a file into that
does this (see the UbuntuInstall wiki page as an example).  Typically we
create a group called 'usrp', give the device file root.usrp ownership,
and 660 permissions.  Then just add users to group 'usrp' as needed.

> Additionally what scripts can I run to check gnuradio is working without a
> USRP attached?

The best method is to run the 'make check' command from the top-level
source directory.  This runs through hundreds of unit tests on various
parts of the tree.  But you've already done that.

In $prefix/share/gnuradio/examples/* you'll see a number of installed
example programs.  Under 'audio' there is dial_tone.py, a simple tone
generator that will test your audio output as well.

More complicated are the 'digital' examples.  You can run
'benchmark_loopback.py' without a USRP and it will exercise a lot of the
tree.

Let us know how it works out.

-- 
Johnathan Corgan
Corgan Enterprises LLC
http://corganenterprises.com