Which LinuxOS to use?-->1.Unbuntu, Fedora, Mandrake, FreeBSD

GNU Radio
1

Hello everyone!
I am new to the GNU world.

I am an intern at NASA AIMES and we are about to run three brand new
SDRs. Basically we are trying to use some Linux laptops with the USRP’s
for SRD research.

I have less than two months to get this project going, and we just got
three brand new Laptops and USRP kits yesterday.

My Question: What Linux operating system seems to work the BEST with
GNU USRP, mainly in reference to system failure, and having previously
defined libraries/classes/modules previously installed?
Right now we are going with UBUNTU (per my superiors:)-)but for some
reason I would like to use Fedora.
What do you think?

Due to the limited time I am trying to save myself as much heart ache as
possible, therefore any advice is welcomed and greatly appreciated,
especially in choosing an operating system.

2

Hello!
NASA AMES? I know of that facility. Its over the LA area at one of the
original NACA research facility sites, next door to Moffet field,
named for an Admiral who championed the airship. Let’s just say I’ve
got a good feeling for what goes on at the NASA research places. (Ask
me off list if your really curious.)

But anyway of the ones you’v mentioned, Ubuntu is good because its
even easier to use then Debian, which is what it is based on. Mandrake
was renamed Mandriva because of copyright complaints. Fedora is still
too unstable. I personally prefer Slackware Linux www.slackware.com
for all of my Intel based setups.

–
Gregg C Levine [email protected]
“This signature was once found posting rude
messages in English in the Moscow subway.”

3

Quenton B. wrote:

defined libraries/classes/modules previously installed? Right now we are
going with UBUNTU (per my superiors:)-)but for some reason I would like
to use Fedora. What do you think?

By no means do I claim Ubuntu is best, but I can verify that the
current release (Dapper Drake, 6.06 I believe) has all the correct
versions of the compiler, autotools, and support libraries to build
gnuradio from CVS without failure.

-Johnathan, AE6HO

4

Hello,

I experimented with many distributions and eventually settled on Fedora
Core 4 (just before 5 was released). Fedora installed well on the
machines I was using and there are installation scripts at
http://www.kd7lmo.net/ground_gnuradio_install.html to guide the GNU
Radio installation.

Cheers,
~Chris Roberts~

----- Original Message -----
From: Quenton B. [email protected]
Date: Friday, June 23, 2006 1:04 pm
Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] Which LinuxOS to use?–>1.Unbuntu, Fedora,
Mandrake, FreeBSD
To: [email protected]

5

Hey,

See my installation walkthrough at http://m0mik.org for Ubuntu 6.06

Definatly the easiest!!!

Mike
m0mik.org

6

Ubuntu is very easy to install under. Here’s my guide if you want to
check it out: http://www.pattoncentral.org/?p=27

It is based off of the following guides:
* http://m0mik.org/
* http://comsec.com/wiki?HowtoBuildFromCVS
*
Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] usb rights on FC5 and udev

----- Original Message -----
From: Quenton B. [email protected]
Date: Friday, June 23, 2006 1:05 pm
Subject: [Discuss-gnuradio] Which LinuxOS to use?–>1.Unbuntu, Fedora,
Mandrake, FreeBSD
To: [email protected]

7

On Friday 23 June 2006 13:16, Gregg Levine wrote:

But anyway of the ones you’v mentioned, Ubuntu is good because its
even easier to use then Debian, which is what it is based on. Mandrake
was renamed Mandriva because of copyright complaints. Fedora is still
too unstable. I personally prefer Slackware Linux www.slackware.com
for all of my Intel based setups.

I’m curious as to where you’ve found Fedora to be unstable, and what you
mean
by unstable. If it means “changes too much too quickly” then, yes,
Fedora
does do that. It’s not unusual to get a couple hundred MB worth of
updates
in a week’s time. GNUradio compiles and works fine on FC5, though.

I’m using GNUradio in production on CentOS 4 (based off Red Hat
Enterprise
Linux 4 sources), and it is stable at this point. It is not an easy
task
getting it to build on CentOS 4, though. On FC5 the build was pretty
painless, once I found an SDCC package that worked.

Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

8

UBUNTU (new)

What I did to get started on newest ubuntu is just install from universe
the
gnuradio packages

http://packages.ubuntulinux.org/breezy/comm/gnuradio-examples

This installs all the dependencies and then just uninstall gnuradio
packages and
compile from cvs and follow the walkthrough from earlier email.

FEDORA (new)

Here are my notes (less formal than walkthrough) for FC5 out of the box,
read
with care, mileage may vary

update distro!!

add to sudo user

add user to wheel group /etc/group
/etc/sudoers
/sbin/visudo
then edit sudoers to add users to wheel

Network,

host name needs to change among networks

not so obvious needed:
libusb (yum)
libusb-devel (yum)
kernel source for comedilib
(?) comedi-0.7.70.tar.gz (download)
comedilib-0.7.22.tar.gz
PortAudio (download daily check out (if fails get pa_previous_snapshot))

before jack
follow README in gr dir

(maybe)
in source tree make link to libtool

ln -s /usr/bin/libtool .
(maybe)

./configure
make
sudo make install
/sbin/ldconfig

jack >= 0.80 (download)
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/jackit/jack-audio-connection-kit-0.100.0.tar.gz
./configure

make sure it give something like

jack-audio-connection-kit 0.100.0 :

| Build with ALSA support… : true
| Build with OSS support… : true
| Build with CoreAudio support… : false
| Build with PortAudio support… : true
|
| Default driver backend… : “alsa”
| Shared memory interface… : “System V”

comedilib

need to be root to make
sudo make
sudo make install

Next you need to mess with pkg-config for portaudio so edit file
/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig/portaudio-2.0.pc
and change exec-prefix to just prefix

cvs checkout:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:[email protected]:/sources/gnuradio co -P
gr-build

go into gr-build directory:
./checkout -x mc4020

./for-all-dirs …/buildit

Export python path to .bash_profile
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages

Quoting mjam01 [email protected]:

9

On Monday 26 June 2006 11:42, Marcus L. wrote:

FC6 is just around the corner–the TEST1 release is already available.
Sigh.

Yeah, I had sworn I wasn’t going to get back on the Fedora roller
coaster;
that’s why I use CentOS of the servers. But the needs of the bleeding
edge
have conspired to cause me to go with FC5… the needs being driven by
GNUradio in part, and Plone in part.

But with YUM, it’s relatively painless to “keep up”.

Depending upon your bandwidth, at least.

Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu

10

Lamar:

I installed Ubunto 5.X and GnuRadio just made and ran after I used apt
(synaptic) to download any package GnuRadio could not find. With Ubunto
6.0X I had to make a modification to aclocal.m4 (and I am sure there
are other ways to fix it) in gnuradio-core but otherwise, it just
compiled and ran. It is easy to install and maintain and with the
opening up to universe, multiverse, nongpl code as opposed to Debian on
which it is based, I find I am not building out of necessity. I have
CHOSEN (for example) to build swig.1.2.latest for various reasons but I
did not need to.

Bob

Lamar Owen wrote:

But with YUM, it’s relatively painless to “keep up”.

Depending upon your bandwidth, at least.

–
AMSAT VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats,
NJQRP/AMQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR Wrk Grp Chairman
Time for a new motto, what should I choose?

11

Lamar Owen wrote:

FC6 is just around the corner–the TEST1 release is already available.
Sigh.

But with YUM, it’s relatively painless to “keep up”.

–
Marcus L. Mail: Dept 1A12, M/S: 04352P16
Security Standards Advisor Phone: (ESN) 393-9145 +1 613 763 9145
Strategic Standards
Nortel Networks [email protected]

12

I , too, am an Ubuntu 6.06 user. What were you attempting to fix by
modifying gnuradio-core/aclocal.m4?

Mark

13

I need php5. php5-dev wants version 1.4 things because Ubuntu there
is some issue. I could not get aclocal to work unless I forced
aclocal.m4 by hand to call automake-1.9 for example. I got all of these
am python not found and other blow ups leading to complete failure. As
soon as I modified aclocal.m4 forcing the call to later versions of the
auto tools, everything worked.

Bob

Mark Petrovic wrote:

I installed Ubunto 5.X and GnuRadio just made and ran after I used
but I
available.
>
NJQRP/AMQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR Wrk Grp Chairman

Discuss-gnuradio Info Page

–
AMSAT VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats,
NJQRP/AMQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR Wrk Grp Chairman
Time for a new motto, what should I choose?

14

Robert McGwier wrote:

I need php5. php5-dev wants version 1.4 things because Ubuntu there
is some issue. I could not get aclocal to work unless I forced
aclocal.m4 by hand to call automake-1.9 for example. I got all of these
am python not found and other blow ups leading to complete failure. As
soon as I modified aclocal.m4 forcing the call to later versions of the
auto tools, everything worked.

At least Debian has update-alternatives, which is quite usefuill with
aclocal, I have 3 versions of automake (1.{4,7,9}.

I do not see any way to tell aclocal which atomake to use, but
update-alternatives before building should let you avoid changing the
source.

Patrick

Engineers motto: cheap, good, fast: choose any two
Patrick S.
Student of Telematik, Techn. University Graz, Austria

15

Patrick:

Thanks for the pointer to update-alternatives. Ubuntu is mostly built
on top of debian and it is there. I was told about “alternatives” but
the suggestion was slightly garbled from what was correct so I could not
find it immediately. I lost motivation after I got things to work by
modifying GnuRadio locally.

Bob

Patrick S. wrote:

I do not see any way to tell aclocal which atomake to use, but
update-alternatives before building should let you avoid changing the
source.

Patrick

–
AMSAT VP Engineering. Member: ARRL, AMSAT-DL, TAPR, Packrats,
NJQRP/AMQRP, QRP ARCI, QCWA, FRC. ARRL SDR Wrk Grp Chairman
Time for a new motto, what should I choose?

16

On Wed, Jun 28, 2006 at 10:40:37AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:

On Monday 26 June 2006 18:22, Robert McGwier wrote:

I installed Ubunto 5.X and GnuRadio just made and ran after I used apt
(synaptic) to download any package GnuRadio could not find. With Ubunto

Yes; on Fedora Core 5 I just used ‘yum install’ in an identical fashion as you
would use ‘apt-get install’ to grab the dependencies, with the singular
exception of SDCC, which I built from a source RPM and then installed
with ‘rpm -i’. At some point I’m going to put together GNUradio RPMs for
FC5; I however track CVS/SVN and that makes it difficult. I’ve not built a
tarball release in a very long time.

Lamar, if you get the spec files worked out, let me know and I’ll cut
new tarballs so that we have corresponding tarballs and rpms.

My comment about bandwidth (I have a 1.5Mbit DSL at home) is in keeping up
with package updates; no one but SuSE deals with this as yet, and I’m not
sure if SuSE still does package deltas or not.

I can confirm that SuSE does package deltas.

Eric

17

On Monday 26 June 2006 18:22, Robert McGwier wrote:

I installed Ubunto 5.X and GnuRadio just made and ran after I used apt
(synaptic) to download any package GnuRadio could not find. With Ubunto

Yes; on Fedora Core 5 I just used ‘yum install’ in an identical fashion
as you
would use ‘apt-get install’ to grab the dependencies, with the singular
exception of SDCC, which I built from a source RPM and then installed
with ‘rpm -i’. At some point I’m going to put together GNUradio RPMs
for
FC5; I however track CVS/SVN and that makes it difficult. I’ve not
built a
tarball release in a very long time.

Virtually all the modern distributions can do these sorts of automatic
dependency resolution these days; it often falls to what packages you
need
and whether there is a package repository containing the mix of packages
you
need. PHP5, for instance, is in Fedora Core 5 already, and I didn’t
need to
do any aclocal.m4 modifications to build GNUradio.

My comment about bandwidth (I have a 1.5Mbit DSL at home) is in keeping
up
with package updates; no one but SuSE deals with this as yet, and I’m
not
sure if SuSE still does package deltas or not. The FC5 updates run
several
hundred megabytes per month; sometimes per week. Not sure about Ubuntu;
I
have a copy of Dapper, but have not had time to install it (I’m quite
happy
with CentOS 4 on the servers and FC5 on the linux desktops here; using a
local repository rsynced to the master repos helps on the bandwidth
side).
The CentOS updates comprise far less volume on the machines that don’t
use
the kde-redhat repository; those that do use kde-redhat can get a
hundred MB
or so per month since that repository includes later OpenOffice.org
packages,
as well as core kde libs and such.

Lamar Owen
Director of Information Technology
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC 28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu