GNU Radio Release 3.2 available for download or binary installation

GNU Radio
1

Release 3.2 of the GNU Software Radio toolkit is now available for
binary installation (for Ubuntu 9.04) or for download as a source code
tarball (for other Linux distributions, OSX, *BSD, or Win32/Cygwin).

Binary installation for Ubuntu 9.04 is accomplished by adding the GNU
Radio repository to the system packaging configuration and installing
selected packages, which will automatically pull-in required runtime
packages and configure your system for use with the USRP or USRP2
hardware. This is the fastest and easiest way to get a working GNU
Radio installation:

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

(Earlier versions of Ubuntu also support GNU Radio 3.2, but will
require a source code install of GNU Radio and some dependencies).

For other systems, you will need to download the GNU Radio source code
tarballs:

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuradio/gnuradio-3.2.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuradio/gr-howto-write-a-block-3.2.tar.gz

The instructions for installation from source code for a wide variety
of systems is at:

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

These guides have been written for release 3.1 and over the course of
development of release 3.2, and may not reflect the latest state of
individual operating systems or GNU Radio. Maintainers of these wiki
pages are encouraged to review and edit as necessary.

Release 3.2 is the beginning of the new stable branch series 3.2.x.
Users who develop their GNU Radio applications to the 3.2 C++ and
Python APIs will not need to change their source code to work with any
of the releases along this line, though recompilation of C++ code may
be needed.

The GNU Radio development trunk remains available for users to obtain
via Subversion. As we begin the development process for release 3.3,
however, the API will be changing in ways that may require you to
modify your applications along the way.

I’d like to thank the large cast of developers who have contributed
source code, documentation, bug fixes and support via the
discuss-gnuradio mailing list to make this release possible.

Johnathan C.
Corgan Enterprises LLC

2

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 08:07:35AM -0700, Johnathan C. wrote:

Release 3.2 of the GNU Software Radio toolkit is now available for
binary installation (for Ubuntu 9.04) or for download as a source code
tarball (for other Linux distributions, OSX, *BSD, or Win32/Cygwin).

Yeah!!

Special thanks to Johnathan for managing the release process and to
all of us who contributed their time and effort to improving GNU Radio!

We know that there are still some patches outstanding. We haven’t
lost them, we just wanted to get 3.2 out the door so that we can begin
work on some new features. We will review the patches. Please be
patient.

New features that are coming relatively soon include:

  • Ability of blocks to produce different number of samples on each
    output stream.

  • Comprehensive message passing system that allows packet based data
    to be dealt with more naturally. This will blend many of the
    features
    that were in mblocks into the base class of all GNU Radio blocks,
    thus allowing seamless integration between data flow and message
    passing styles in the same application. This should make writing
    MACs much easier.

  • Annotation of streams with arbitrary metadata, including such
    things as FPGA timestamp.

Stay tuned for further developments!

Eric

3

I’m in the process of verifying that my MacPorts Portfiles work with
the 3.2 release – before releasing them “into the wild” – by
updating them with the actual release requirements (e.g., no inband,
pmt, mblock, atsc, ). During this process, I’m come upon a bug in the
3.2 release tarball:

In r11104 (23-May), when the USRP-inband and related codes were
removed from the configure script (primarily via the M4 files in
config), the “GRC_WITH” command in grc_usrp.m4 was also removed –
when it should have been truncated! Without this command, the “–with-
usrp” configure flag doesn’t work! Interestingly, ‘./configure –
help’ shows this option as available; so it’s there, but it does
nothing. Was it also desired the completely remove PMT and MBLOCK
from compilation? They are still available in configure.ac .

Here’s the ‘diff -u’ on grc_usrp.m4, for anyone who needs it; you’ll
need to re-‘bootstrap’ before it comes effective:

— config/grc_usrp.m4.orig 2009-05-23 17:39:09.000000000 -0400
+++ config/grc_usrp.m4 2009-05-26 10:11:08.000000000 -0400
@@ -20,6 +20,8 @@
AC_DEFUN([GRC_USRP],[
GRC_ENABLE(usrp)

  • GRC_WITH(usrp)
  • dnl Don't do usrp if omnithread skipped
GRC_CHECK_DEPENDENCY(usrp, omnithread)
4

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 9:20 AM, Michael D. [email protected]
wrote:

In r11104 (23-May), when the USRP-inband and related codes were removed from
the configure script (primarily via the M4 files in config), the “GRC_WITH”
command in grc_usrp.m4 was also removed – when it should have been
truncated! Without this command, the “–with-usrp” configure flag doesn’t
work! Interestingly, ‘./configure --help’ shows this option as available;
so it’s there, but it does nothing. Was it also desired the completely
remove PMT and MBLOCK from compilation? They are still available in
configure.ac .

Congratulations on the first bug report for release 3.2. Yes, this
was inadvertently removed.

This only affects people using the --with-* configuration options,
primarily *BSD and OSX users. If you are using the traditional build
sequence there is no issue. The Ubuntu binary packages are also
unaffected.

Go ahead and patch and check-in the .m4 file once you’ve verified
operation.

Thanks,

Johnathan