[Discuss-gnuradio] Quick-and-dirty GNU Radio (Geeko powered!)

[Gregor Dschung]

Hello,

When you build GNU Radio for the first time successfully (after twenty 
times calling ./configure, until you have all the dependencies), you get 
a sense of pleasure. Maybe, this initial overhead is desired, as it 
prevents the community from noobs without the iron will of getting GNU 
Radio running. Personally, I don't think it's that difficult.

GNU Radio itself provides an Ubuntu repository, but it doesn't seem to 
be maintaned (last modified in Oct 2009). So some time ago, I started to 
package GNU Radio for my own system.

I've used the openSUSE Build Service [1] for almost a year, and -- after 
some initial overhead -- it has been working like a charm for me. But as 
I won't use GNU Radio for the next term, I can't keep the repository 
updated any longer. You can find the repository under [2] and you are 
invited to clone, branch, and maintain that repo.

A few notes:
- The package "gnuradio" is used to build the latest stable release 
(gnuradio-3.3.0) and the "next" release. The sources are fetched and the 
spec-files are updated by the script gnuradio-next_update.sh. But as 
there are a few patches to get an package according to the openSUSE 
packaging guidelines, you can't always update the package with the 
following steps. Sometimes, you have to adapt the patches:
    1) sh gnuradio-next_update.sh
    2) osc rm gnuradio-next-<old>.tar.bz2
    3) osc add gnuradio-next-<new>.tar.bz2
    4) osc vc # Edit the changelog
    5) osc ci -m 'update'
- Both, gnuradio and gnuradio-next, have their files in the gnuradio 
repository. The gnuradio-next package is only a link onto the gnuradio 
package, so that the OBS uses the gnuradio-next.spec instead of the 
gnuradio.spec.
- When I startet the packaging process, OBS didn't provide the feature 
to create a tar-ball from a git repository. This feature was implemented 
in the meanwhile. Nevertheless, the gnuradio-next_update.sh, 
gnuradio_update.sh and libuhd_update.sh scripts are more flexible, as 
they extract some information from the meta information located in the 
git repository.
- The last build I've used _productively_ (with USRP2) was based on an 
checkout from October or November.
- I've just updated to the current HEAD and resolved some building 
errors (I had to adapt the patch-file for the package gnuradio-next, and 
meanwhile, libuhd.so changed to libuhd.so.002, so that package needed a 
rename, too).
- I haven't minded new features implemented since October or November 
(e.g. VOLK compiled successfully, but I didn't test it).

If you have already an openSUSE 11.3 installation and you just want to 
play with GNU Radio, just add the download repository to zypper / yast:
# zypper ar -f 
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/chkpnt:/gnuradio/openSUSE_11.3/home:chkpnt:gnuradio.repo
# zypper in gnuradio-next
You'll need gnuradio-next-devel, too, if you want to compile your own 
blocks against GNU Radio. I've tested the packages with a clean 
installation within a VM and it worked for me. Nevertheless, I want to 
mention that the last time I used the packages productively (with USRP2) 
was two / three months ago.

With SUSE Studio it is very simple to build an appliance based on RPMs 
[3]. I've composed a GNU Radio appliance that can be found in the SUSE 
Gallery [4]. There is a Live-CD / USB-Stick, if you just want to try out 
GNU Radio on a new system. And there is a VMware-Appliance, if you want 
to use GNU Radio in parallel to your existing operating system. I have 
used this VMware approach since UHD works fine, as I have mainly worked 
under Windows (had very disappointing experience with Xilinx ISE 10 
under openSUSE... maybe, ISE 12 is running better...). To download, you 
have to sign in (OpenID like Google is supported). Nevertheless, as I 
don't know how long SUSE Gallery stores the appliances, they are 
mirrored on [5], too.

Cheers, and have fun,
Gregor


[1] http://build.opensuse.org
[2] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show?project=home:chkpnt:gnuradio
[3] http://www.susestudio.com
[4] http://susegallery.com/a/MjwCkX/gnu-radio--2
[5] http://www.dschung.de/gnuradio/