Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Introduction.

[Eric Blossom]

On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 09:46:02AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> Good Morning.
> 
> We at PARI have purchased a USRP for radio astronomy purposes.

Welcome!

> I spent the better part of two days getting all the prerequisites installed 
> on 
> my CentOS 4 laptop; whew, there are some doozies!  The worst was wxPython; 
> nowhere in the wiki that I could find the version required.

Try reading the README's in each tarball ;-)

FYI, it installs pretty much painlessly under Mandrake 10.*, FC2 and FC3

> I had built the CVS version; the release of 2.5 changed things a
> little.  I had built wxPython 2.4; found after reading in the source
> dist for gr-wxgui that it needed 2.5, and built that.  I can provide
> RPMs for the packages that lend themselves to RPMs, and might even
> consider packaging GNUradio proper as RPM.

FYI, there are RPM's for wxPython.
See http://www.wxpython.org/download.php#binaries

> My qualifications for doing that are the five years I spent maintaining the 
> RPM's for PostgreSQL.

Packaging GNU Radio into RPM's would be great!

> The whole single-precision fftw was also kindof a bear, and will break the 
> next time yum pulls down an update.  That's a little too fragile for my 
> liking.

You can install both single and double precision.  If you like,
you can install the single precision in /usr/local and keep it out of
yum's way.  Or better yet, get somebody to fix the upstream RPM so
they build and install both versions.

> However, I'm excited to be working towards this; our technical director, 
> Charles Osborne, has been active on the SARA list about these things, and I 
> decided to go ahead and join the list here (makes three dozen and one lists 
> now) to see how things develop.

Being on the list is pretty much essential for using the USRP and GNU Radio...

> We plan on developing full-bore spectroscopy frontends, both local GUI and 
> Web 
> GUI, as well as RPC-type remote spectrometers (like, putting a USRP and a 
> small low-power PC in the feedbox of one of our 26m telescopes and sending 
> the data down GigE over fiber).

This all sounds like good fun!

> Now to save up and get a USRP for myself (ARS callsign KF4MYT).
> -- 
> Lamar Owen

Eric