Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] No module name gnuradio

[Eric Blossom]

On Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 08:23:55PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> 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.

Hi Weo,

Sorry to hear about your trouble, and at the same time, thanks for
spelling it all out.

A couple of comments, in general.  I don't mean these as any kind of a
personal attack, if anything, it just shows that we *do* have
challenges with installation.

> 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.

Good choice.   It's one of the two distributions I use every day.
FWIW I also use KDE.

With Mandrake 10.1, I believe that there are only *three* things that
didn't come with the distribution that you would have needed to build.
Even fewer with SuSE 9.3 Pro.

These would have been cppunit, FFTW and SDCC.  

> 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.

The README in gnuradio-core contains the magic required for FFTW, e.g.,

    (2)  FFTW 3.0 or later            http://www.fftw.org

    IMPORTANT!!!  When building FFTW, you MUST use the --enable-single and
    --enable-shared configure options.  This builds the single precision
    floating point version which we use.  You should also use either the
    --enable-3dnow or --enable-sse options if you're on an Athlon or Pentium
    respectively.

FYI, I just confirmed that fftw-3.0.1.tar.gz builds perfectly out of the box.

  ./configure --enable-single --enable-shared --enable-sse
  make
  make install


Out of curiosity, where did you ever get the idea that "make
distclean" was a good idea?  Stands for "distribution clean" and
generally used only by folks (possibly with special tools) while
building distributions.  I only use it when generating and testing the
tarballs.  I would put using "make distclean" in the "blowing your own
foot off" category ;)

> 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).

Not true.  Having /usr/local/bin in your PATH goes a long way.

I understand that if you're not familar with Linux or other Unix
like things, some of this may seem abritrary and capricious, but it's
really the water we swim in.  Perhaps investing in a "getting started
with Linux system administration" book might help.

> After redoing all those compiles, more failures led to 
> the realization that automake was not up to snuff,

Also not true.  I'm using whatever came with Mandrake 10.1 and 
SuSE 9.3.  A quick check shows that Mandrake 10.1 ships with 1.8.5 and 1.4.

  address@hidden usrp]$ ls -l /usr/bin/automake*
  lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root     26 Dec 22  2004 /usr/bin/automake -> 
/etc/alternatives/automake
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 199561 Jul 26  2004 /usr/bin/automake-1.4
  -rwxr-xr-x  1 root root 211025 May 20  2004 /usr/bin/automake-1.8

Have you tried Mandrake's graphical "Software Management" tool?
It's right on the panel and looks like a red wrench.  Brings up
"Mandrake Control Center", then click on "Software Management", then
"Install", search for "automake".

> 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.

Yes, you do need to install boost.  

Boost 1-1_31 in /usr/local works fine.  Yes, I agree that if it's
installed somewhere else or a different version, it's a serious pain.
This definitely needs fixing.

> 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.

Sorry to hear that.

Looks like all of this validates Lamar's point about RPMs being "the
right answer" for RPM based systems.  [The challenge from the
developer's point of view is that there are so many distributions and
versions, and they potentially require different rpm specification
files, build specific fixes, etc.  But hey, that's not your problem...]

> And I did try downloading and preparing a knoppix prebuilt system; for some 
> reason this fails to boot.

I don't have much experience with Knoppix or other "live CDs".

> If there is an easier way, perhaps someone can tell me.

Looks like RPM's would make your life easier.

As soon as we release the 2.6 tarballs, you may want to try building
using them.  Or wait for a Mandrake 10.1 set of RPMs.

> Thank you,  Weo  WN6I

Thanks for all of your input.  And again, sorry to hear about your
frustration.  With some luck and effort I think we can address most of
your concerns.  

Regarding "inscrutable command lines" --

Learning to use/program the shell is an eye opener, and an amazing
productivity tool, especially if you come from a dumbed down windows
environment.  Lots of good tutorials on the web.  Look for ones on
/bin/sh "The Bourne Shell", or "Bash".  If you like your information
really dense, try "man bash" -- it's all in there.  Avoid csh and
tcsh, they're different beasts, and the last thing you need right now
are more options to complicate your life!

73, K7GNU
Eric