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1.2 Building & Installing GNU Radio

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Jack Sankey edited this page Jul 1, 2017 · 1 revision

For this step, you do not need the Crimson hardware to be present.

  1. Download our build-gnuradio-crimson bash script and store it in an empty folder of your choosing (this is where many libraries will be downloaded).
  2. Open a terminal, navigate to this folder and run the following command:
$ bash build-gnuradio-crimson -v

The script will ask if you wish to proceed, to which you can type y (and hit the <enter> key). Also answer y to the question about whether you have "sudo" privileges, then supply your password (if necessary). The script will then start chugging along, checking which libraries are installed, and installing any that are missing (~10 minutes for me). It then asks if it's okay to fetch gnuradio and extras, to which you can reply y again. At this point, all kinds of source code will start appearing in the directory of the build-gnuradio-crimson script, and the script will proceed to build everything. Expect this to take hours. At the end, the script gives you some advice about editing the .bashrc or equivalent file in your home directory to include a line such as

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

Follow this advice. Note your PYTHONPATH may actually be different than the one shown above, but the script supplies this information for you.

After everything is built and installed, you can (if you want) save the install_manifest.txt files, which can be found with the command

find | grep install_manifest.txt

which, for our system, produces this output:

./gnuradio/build/install_manifest.txt
./uhd/host/build/install_manifest.txt

These files contain lists of where everything was copied on your system, which will allow you to, e.g., uninstall (delete) everything. Once you have these (or decide you don't need them), you can then delete the folder of the build script.

Things I'd like help with

  • This script is a version of the "old school" build script, modified to point to the Per Vices UHD libraries instead of the defaults, and removing a lot of extra libraries used for other hardware (to prevent compile failures due to bad code maintenance, mostly!). Gnuradio has since switched to an installation platform known as "PyBOMBS", which you can read about here. I couldn't immediately figure out how to modify this approach to point to the Per Vices UHD library, but will happily post that information here if anyone wants to figure it out. Apparently this is the wave of the future?

  • I'd like to find a bulletproof means of installing this into an Anaconda Python directory. It may just amount to editing the build script (I'm no expert at bash), but probably the best solution involves moving to PyBOMBS.

  • Windows? A lot of laboratory software (unfortunately) requires Windows, so this might be a nice option. Perhaps it's best to keep this thing on a stable Linux box, however, and then implement LabRAD to have the windows machines downloading the processed data.

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