Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] GRC Fails to Display QT/WX Elements

[Tom Rondeau]

On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 10:55 PM, Crypto.Troop <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I just installed GNURADIO from git, onto a brand new install of Mint 15. I
> followed the following instructions:
> http://bgamari.github.io/posts/2013-06-15-hackrf.html
>
> gnuradio-config-info -v
> 3.7.0git-143-gad1d52fd
>
> With Python 2.7, I was able to get everything compiled and installed. The
> CMakeLists.txt in GNURADIO I had to tweak line(168) to:
> find_package(PythonLibs 2.7) for it to include Python support.
>
> My environment vars:
> PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:
> PYTHONPATH=:/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
>
> I built GNURADIO with the following cmake:
> cmake -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python2.7
> -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python2.7
> -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpython2.7.so.1 ../
>
> I fire up gnuradio-companion and try a simple example dial_tone.grc. I click
> generate, then execute, I see the standard "Executing ..."/tmp/dial_tone.py"
> "Using Volk machine: svx_64_mmx"  etc... No other errors. My problem is, no
> QT/WX GUI elements show up.

There are only 2 WX sliders in this graph, no other gui elements. You
are saying that neither of those sliders appear?

> I built a simple grc file with a QT slider(and nothing else), and this
> worked.
> I tried a basic signal source, through a throttle right into a QT FFT GUI
> element. The grc runs, no errors, yet the physical display of the FFT fails.
> I have on another box gnuradio 3.6.5 and all of this worked fine. I compared
> qt/wx/python debs and verified both machines have similar packages.
>
> The key common factor in this problem is if i remove the signal sources and
> sinks, the QT/WX basic sliders will show... Perhaps there is something wrong
> with my version of gnuradio and how it handles inputs/outputs, killing GUI
> display? I've also tried compiling against python3, 3.3 and 3.3m...no luck.

No, we don't have any guarantees or expectations that Python 3 will work.

> Is there a way I can enable an extra layer of debug into GRC for me to see
> what it's doing??

If you launched GRC from a terminal, take a look at the output of the
terminal when you run your program; you may see something there that
indicates what's going on. There's no extra verbose mode for GRC. You
can also just run the built .py file by hand in a terminal, which will
show you any errors or warnings generated, too.

> I've tried running /tmp/dial_tone.py directly and it run's, but no audio or
> gui elements display. Another hint which may help, is a basic audio source
> to audio sink, set to "pulse" does not output audio into my speakers. The
> audio does work with the OS audio tests, and I am running pulseaudio.

I tend to use 'pulse' with no problems. You could also try
'plughw:0,0' or just 'hw:0,0' to use the ALSA drivers directly.

> I would like to stay with the latest GNURADIO simply to support my HackRf
> board, in which the HackRf gr-osmosdr library seems to only support the
> latest version. I tried with 3.6.5 and it failed to compile...
>
> Thank you for any insight,
> Mark

Yeah, you'd have to go back a bit in the gr-osmosdr git history before
they updated to the 3.7 style.

Unfortunately, you aren't the only one who has claimed issues with the
GUI elements with 3.7. The biggest problem is that it seems random who
does and who does not have a problem. I've tested 3.7 on many machines
with different video cards, versions of Ubuntu, and non-Ubuntu Linux
VMs and all of them have worked fine for me. Without being able to
duplicate this error, I don't even know where to start with addressing
it.

The only thing that comes to mind is a problem we had with something
else that seems to be a result of using GCC 4.7. I always just use 4.6
to that I can build and use ControlPort. If someone who is having
these problems can tell me if they are using 4.7 or not, that'd be
great. Also, if you are using 4.7, could you move back to using 4.6
and rebuild GNU Radio with that and see if that fixes things? You can
apt-get install {gcc-4.6, g++-4.6} and then symlink /usr/bin/gcc-4.6
to /usr/local/bin/{gcc,cc} and /usr/bin/g++ /usr/local/bin/{g++,c++}.

Tom