Jrock and Ibob attempt to create the most recent gnu radio implementation fresh from the GNU radio svn.

12/19/08

James and Bob go to the grid.

The first and lamest attempt was a simple apt-get install gnuradio. This failed miserably due to unresolved dependeniceis. Following the instructions of (​http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki/DebianPackages) for Ubuntu installations, we added

deb http://gnuradio.org/ubuntu stable main contrib
deb-src http://gnuradio.org/ubuntu stable main

to the /etc/apt/sources.list

This didn't help. The trail of failed dependencies goes as follows:

gnuradio -> python-gnuradio -> python-gnuradio-comedi ->  libcomedi-0.7.22

the last one is not installable as there is no package target.

It should be noted that the baseline image is based on debian (and not ubuntu, so this may be the problem).

---

We're going to attempt the debian source install, the apt install doesn't work for the previously mentioned reasons. We installed the build-essentials package. And we nnow modify the sources list again. we added

 deb http://ftp.at.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib

We then ran apt-get build-dep gnuradio which had 519 megs of stuff to install. It was followed by apt-get build-dep usrp which had nothing to install.

All of this was to "prep" the image for a build of the gnu-radio software by source. There is no source package for it, we have to check it out from svn. (note: this required installing subversion package).

Running

svn co http://gnuradio.org/svn/gnuradio/branches/releases/3.1 gnuradio

yeilds a large download and a gnuradio directory. Hopefully with all the dep building of prior this should be a make / make install simple setup.

First running ./bootstrap required automake, that we didn't have. After apt-getting the automake package and all its dependencies, ./bootstrap chugs along. Note: this take a while, and throws a bunch of perl warnings.

./configure yeilds

*********************************************************************
The following GNU Radio components have been successfully configured:

config
omnithread
gnuradio-core
gr-audio-alsa
gr-audio-jack
gr-audio-oss
gr-audio-portaudio
gr-atsc
gr-gsm-fr-vocoder
gr-pager
gr-radio-astronomy
gr-trellis
gr-video-sdl
gr-wxgui
gnuradio-examples

You my now run the make command to build these components.

*********************************************************************
The following components were skipped either because you asked not
to build them or they didn't pass configuration checks:

usrp
gr-usrp
gr-audio-osx
gr-audio-windows
gr-comedi
gr-gpio
gr-radar-mono
gr-sounder
gr-utils

These components will not be built.

The make process takes a 1.5 hours. We've run out of time on our slot, so I'm saving an image.

INFO n_1_1: - Saving disk image from node n_1_1 in the file 'node-1-1-2008-12-19-16-01-15.ndz'

Image creation was a success:

 INFO exp: - Saving process finished correctly at: Fri Dec 19 16:13:07 -0500 2008
 INFO Experiment: DONE!
 INFO ExecApp: Application 'commServer' finished
 INFO run: Experiment sb5_2008_12_19_15_59_43 finished after 13:26

I moved a copy from the tmp directory to the images directory and renamed it.It has 777 permissions.

ssugrim@repository2:/export/orbit/image$ ls -al | grep james
-rw-r--r-- 1 ssugrim       winlab      585105408 2008-12-19 16:22 james-bob-gnuradio-ver0.ndz

---

1/28/09

The saga continues…

The make was actually successful. We ran make install intinally, but after consulting with the documentation the correct order of steps was:

$ ./bootstrap         # Do NOT perform this step if you are building from a tarball.
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install

---

We had to do some group modifications to get udev devices to show up properly. Note that in lsusb:

node1-1:~# lsusb
Bus 004 Device 002: ID fffe:0002  <--- this is the usrp
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000  
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 

From here we had to create a usrp group, add root to it, and then throw some file in the udev rules. Like So:

sudo addgroup usrp
sudo addgroup <YOUR_USERNAME> usrp
echo 'ACTION=="add", BUS=="usb", SYSFS{idVendor}=="fffe", SYSFS{idProduct}=="0002", GROUP:="usrp", MODE:="0660"' > tmpfile
sudo chown root.root tmpfile
sudo mv tmpfile /etc/udev/rules.d/10-usrp.rules

NOTE: the naming convention of the rules files on the flavor of debian thats on the nodes is a little different. I made a copy of the 10-usrp.rules and named it z10_usrp.rules. Not really sure which one its reading, but ehh disk space is cheap.

that being said, post actual reboot (not restarting udev as the guide suggests) ls -lR /dev/bus/usb | grep usrp yeilds:

node1-1:~# ls -lR /dev/bus/usb | grep usrp
crw-rw---- 1 root usrp 189, 385 Jan 28 14:20 002

The guide claims one entry per usrp (and thus just one entry).

---

We added PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gnuradio/

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gnuradio/

We're trying to import one of the gnuraido libraries into a running python shell, it's complaining about

ImportError: libgnuradio-core.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Bob seems to think this is caused by the Broken libtool on Debian and Ubuntu documented in the Ubuntu install docs.

To fix it we modified the ld.so.conf and ran ldconfig.

cp /etc/ld.so.conf /tmp/ld.so.conf
echo /usr/local/lib >> /tmp/ld.so.conf
mv /tmp/ld.so.conf /etc/ld.so.conf
ldconfig

ldconfig ran with out complaint. the ld.so.conf contains this:

node1-1:~# more /etc/ld.so.conf
include /etc/ld.so.conf.d/*.conf

/usr/local/lib/
node1-1:~# 

after this step in a python shell from gnuradio import gr ran with out complaint.

However from gnuradio import usrp failed, this was due to an error thrown during the configure phase:

The following components were skipped either because you asked not
to build them or they didn't pass configuration checks:

usrp
gr-usrp

That is the usrp stuff was never built. Examining the config.log file in

node1-1:~/gnuradio# less config.log | grep usrp
configure:31892: result: Component usrp requires guile, which was not found. <----
configure:32681: result: Not building component usrp.
configure:32791: result: Component gr-usrp requires usrp, which is not being built or specified via pre-installed files.
configure:32834: result: Not building component gr-usrp.
configure:35081: result: Component gr-gpio requires usrp, which is not being built or specified via pre-installed files.
configure:35495: result: Component gr-radar-mono requires usrp, which is not being built or specified via pre-installed files.
configure:36993: result: Component gr-sounder requires usrp, which is not being built or specified via pre-installed files.
configure:37164: result: Component gr-utils requires usrp, which is not being built or specified via pre-installed files.

From this we can see guile was the missing components (what ever the heck that is). According to the Ubuntu install docs, we need guile version 1.6. Apt-get says that guile is a pointer:

Package guile is a virtual package provided by:
  guile-1.8 1.8.5+1-4.1
  guile-1.6 1.6.8-6.1

We're gonna pick 1.8.

We've reached a stopping point as inventory has clobbered our image.

next time we'll need to

• install guile
• run configure again
• run make, make check, make install again
• check to see if we can run form gnu-radio import uspr. This might require the python path change usrp group addintion and the modifiation to udev the ld.so.conf (linker) modifications.