Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Installing GNU Radio blocks as a regular user

[Marcus Müller]

Hi Leonardo,

So this depends on your situation: If you're allowed to get arbitrary
software installed by asking IT, I'd ask them to install a recent
version of GNU Radio (at *least* 3.7.2, the newer, the better).
Possibly, only outdated versions are in your IT's software package
repositories, so you might need them to build and install from source;
they might refuse.

If that's the case, or you can't ask for arbitrary software:
use pyBombs[1]! It allows installation in a directory prefix of your
choice. Choose "src" as only viable method of software installation.
After pybombs has finished doing its thing, you get a shell script that
you can use to modify the environment variables, so that if you just use
that script in your ~/.bashrc, you will have a system that has a working
GNU Radio, completely without leaving the boundaries of your non-root
user. Downside is that everything that's not on your system (or in an
outdated version) has to be built from source, which will take quite
some time and storage. Afterwards, if all these PCs are the same, you
can just copy the prefix folder to every user's home directory.

Either way, you'll (hopefully) have a working GNU Radio installation
afterwards.
Now, if you used pybombs, you'll already have a prefix directory in your
user's home where your OS will look for when loading libraries etc.
Otherwise, use pybombs now (./pybombs config; ./pybombs env; echo
"source $prefix/setup_env.sh" >> ~/.bashrc) to generate the empty
directory and generate a path-bending script.

When building your student's OOT's, you'd go the normal "cd gr-mymodule;
mkdir build; cd build; cmake ..; make; make install;" route, only that
you'd replace "cmake .." with "cmake
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/userXYZ/prefixdirectory .."; afterwards,
"make install" will install the things into prefixdirectory; awesome!

Best regards,
Marcus

[1]http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/pybombs/wiki/QuickStart

On 04/08/2015 11:52 AM, Leonardo S. Cardoso wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> We’re trying to implement a GNU Radio course here in Lyon (France) where we 
> take the students step-by-step into coding GR modules. At some point we’d 
> like them to follow the out-of-tree modules tutorial but we’ve stumbled upon 
> an unfortunate limitation: the IT guys of our university wont allow root 
> access on any computer, meaning that we can compile but cannot install the 
> blocks...
>
> I come to you guys, to ask for advices on how to implement this. I have some 
> ideas already but I’d like to see if there is any “best practice” ways to do 
> this.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Leonardo Cardoso
>
>
>
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