Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Does anybody have sucessfully installed GNU Radio on Windows

[Eric Blossom]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 01:54:19PM -0700, Matt Dunstan wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>     OK, I really don't know what to do with that GNU Radio. I tried to 
> install 
> it many times with CygWin and MinGW but no success, this is why I have this 
> question: does anybody have sucessfully installed GNU Radio on Windows OS (on 
> the site of Ettus Research it's written: it works under Win 7, XP ...)? or 
> maybe 
> everybody is working under Linux and I shouldn't try to install GNU Radio on 
> Windows because I waste my time as I did in the last 3 month. One may ask why 
> Windows and not Linux: because this is the OS I'm used to and I found it very 
> easy to make any kind of software for my projects. Thank you very much for 
> any 
> answer. Maybe after 3 month finally I will be able to see a signal on my 
> screen, 
> that would be one of the biggest miracles in the world. If it will not start 
> than I will throw it away and find other hardware that is more Windows 
> friendly 
> (DLL drivers and others) and that will help me to make some real world 
> applications because I don't want to use it only to see some signals I want 
> to 
> get and send real data (data packages).
> 
> Best Regards,
> Matt Dunstan.

Hi Matt,

This is a follow up to Nick's answer.

GNU Radio, like most free software projects, is supported by volunteer
efforts.  It is the case that most active developers here tend to
favor the *nix platforms, for reasons quite similar to yours, plus a
lot having to do with freedom.  But that's a different conversation.

That said, we do try to avoid doing anything that would make GNU Radio
NOT work on any platform, including the variety of Microsoft OS's.  We
have users running under Linux (or course), but also OS/X and BSD too.
We also have active users running on x86, x86-64, PPC (32 and 64-bit)
and ARM, so the system as a whole has proven to be quite portable.

If you are interested in better support under Windows, then you, or
perhaps somebody you know, are probably in the best position to make
that happen.  We would be delighted to have good, solid support for
Windows, but that's going to take some effort from somebody.  There
are many experts on this list who are masters in multiple domains.  
At least some of them have deep knowledge of the guts of GNU Radio and
have substantial experience with portability concerns surrounding big,
complex s/w systems.  If you ask good questions, there's a pretty good
chance that these folks will step up to answer your questions.

If you're interested in helping with windows issues, we'd love to have
your assistance.  This is all about growing a bigger pile of high
quality free software.

Finally, we've found that the suggestions mentioned in the link below
have worked well at soliciting quality responses on this mailing list.

  http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/1/ReportingErrors

Thanks for writing.  Sorry to hear about your pain.
We'd love to have better support on windows.  Perhaps you could help?

Eric