[Discuss-gnuradio] Unofficial Gnuradio Installation Procedure for Newbies on Fedora 14

[Nick Othieno]

A little something to help along the newcomers like me :-)

Unoffical installation guide for gnuradio on Fedora 14, January 2011 (Note the gnuradio installation procedure may change and hence render this guide unusable)
==========================================================================================================================
1. Get the UHD prerequisites (install using your distro's package installer):   
    * Git
    * C++
    * CMake
    * Boost
    * LibUSB
    * Python
    * Cheetah
    * Doxygen
    * Docutils

2. Get th UHD source:
  git clone git://code.ettus.com/ettus/uhd.git

3. Generate UHD makefiles with cmake
  cd <uhd-repo-path>/host
  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake ../

4. Build and install UHD
  make
  make test
  sudo make install

  Ensure that libuhd.so is in the ldconfig path of your OS. In fedora 14 I did:
    updatedb &
    locate libuhd.so
    then put the path from the locate command in:
    vim /etc/ld.so.conf.d/uhd.conf

5. Get gnuradio:
  git clone http://gnuradio.org/git/gnuradio.git

6. Install gnuradio prerequisites. Read the instructions from the readme within the gnuradio directory
  cd <path to gnuradio>/gnuradio
  vim README

  In Fedora 14, I installed all packages except fftw using the package manager. I had to install fftw from source because gnuradio requires a custom-built single precision floating point version of fftw

7. Get the fpga code for USRP2 (not sure whether this is important or not)
  cd <path to gnuradio>/gnuradio
  cd usrp2
  rm -rf fpga (but read the inside the fpga directory readme first!)
  git clone git://ettus.sourcerepo.com/ettus/fpga.git

8. Next we download gr-uhd component of gnuradio. Within the gnuradio directory run the following commands
  git branch --track next origin/next
  git checkout next

  A directory called gr-uhd should be visible in the gnuradio directory.

9. Run ./bootstrap in the gnuradio directory.

10. Run ./configure and find out which components are not going to be installed due to missing prerequisites. Look for the missing prerequisites in the ./configure output and install them using your distro's package manager. Some of the components are not important. In my Fedora 14 installation I did not require gcell, gr-audio-jack, gr-audio-osx, gr-audio-windows and gr-comedi.

  In fedora 14, after installing sdcc I had to add the following to the bashrc path since configure could not find sdcc
  export PATH=$PATH:/usr/libexec/sdcc

11. Run make and sudo make install and then run sudo ldconfig . 
12. Create the following line in your bashrc file so that the gnuradio python modules can be found
  export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages

13. Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add this line:

  @usrp  - rtprio 50

14. Your ethernet card must be set to promiscuous mode. In fedora:
  cd /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
  vim ifcfg-eth0

  and add the line:
  PROMISC="yes"

15. If the UHD images have not been written onto the SD card, get them from http://www.ettus.com/downloads/uhd_images/ and write them.

Below is an extract of a procedure for writing the UHD images as posted on the gnuradio mailing list by Elvis Dowson:

  Step 05.01: Locate the correct device for the SD card

  Insert the SD card into the SD card reader slot of your computer.

  Run gparted, the graphical disk partitioning utility to quickly determine which device the SD card is
  connected. Usually /dev/sda would be your primary hard disk, and /dev/sdb would be the SD card.

  Step 05.02: Write the UHD FPGA and firmware images to the SD Card

  Write the new UHD FPGA image to the SD card:

  $ cd uhd/host/utils
  $ sudo ./usrp2_card_burner.py --dev=/dev/sdb --fpga=/home/elvis/Downloads/usrp2-image/u2_rev3_uhd_20100706.bin

  Write the new UHD firmware image to the SD card:

  $ sudo ./usrp2_card_burner.py --dev=/dev/sdb --fw=/home/elvis/Downloads/usrp2-image/txrx_uhd_20100706.bin

16. Configure the ethernet card connected to the USRP2 as follows:
  IP: 192.168.10.1
  Subnet: 255.255.255.0

The default ip address of the USRP2 is 192.168.10.2

Important links

http://www.ettus.com/uhd_docs/manual/html/index.html

http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/WikiStart


16. Configure the Network card connected to the USRP2 as follows:
  IP: 192.168.1.1
  Subnet: 255.255.255.0

17. Run uhd_find_devices to check if the USRP2 can be detected



Nick