Hi, all:
I would like to weigh in on Lamar's comments, especially to comment on the
difficulty of getting gnuradio to compile/install. I know this is really my
own problem, and that this note is headed for the bit bucket, but still I
think posting one person's reasonable set of problems might help someone
else in the future.
I am fairly savvy with computers (having started by writing a compiler on a
1620 a long time ago with punch cards - some of you will recognize this
one, programmed in assembly in college, then APL, PL/I, Pascal, C, etc.),
but linux and all its complexities are still really a barrier, even though
the modern desktops make it look simple.
The potential of gnuradio/usrp has always been very exciting to
me. However, I am actually amazed at how much trouble it has been to get
the code working. I typically have 2-3 hours at a stretch to play with
this, and I have used about 5 such sessions so far, and still I have yet to
communicate with my new usrp. Unfortunately, my "hobby time" is limited,
and I know I am not alone on this one.
I should quickly point out, over the past couple of months, I have had to
come here multiple times to ask for help out of various problems, and Eric
in particular has been extremely helpful and patient. This is wonderful,
but if the whole installation were easier, I would not have had to bother
Eric or the rest of you.
Here's the rough path I took:
After following this discussion for perhaps a year, and taking particular
notice of distributions, etc. it seemed that Mandrake 10.1 official would
be best, so I bought and installed that, including everything I could think
of to get a development-level system. No one said which desktop to take,
so I picked kde.
From the wiki and documentation, it seemed that the instructions from
KD7LMO and from Dawei Shen would be most helpful. Even though KD7LMO's
scripts were for FC, still they seemed worth a try. I started with LMO's,
but then had to start over with Dawei's instructions. As an example of
the various problems, fftw did not compile at the beginning, but after
several tries and stopping the use of "make distclean", I got it to
compile. Then all the baseline packages were installed in /usr/local/bin,
but the gnuradio compilation expects them to be in /usr/bin (apparently - I
did not know this). After redoing all those compiles, more failures led to
the realization that automake was not up to snuff, so I had to find and
install that, too. Start over again on the baseline packages Then boost
was missing, so had to install that. Then there were troubles passing the
location of the boost directory to ./for-all-dirs. So it continues - there
is no choice now but to build each part of gnuradio by hand. I feel like I
am almost there, but I expect more things to have been done wrong by me.
I know it is hard for the programming experts to understand this, but the
huge array of possible locations for the files, the intricacies and
subtleties of the different shells, the inscrutable unix command lines, and
so on, lead to a really large number of ways to mess it up. I still do not
have a working final compilation of the simple code, much less being able
to try to create something new for specific applications.
And I did try downloading and preparing a knoppix prebuilt system; for some
reason this fails to boot.
If there is an easier way, perhaps someone can tell me.
Thank you, Weo WN6I
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