Re: Teething problems with new GNU Radio 3.9 installation

[Ryan Volz]

Hi Brendan,

On April 21, 2021 7:14:41 PM EDT, Brendan Horsfield 
<brendan.horsfield@vectalabs.com> wrote:
> Hi Ryan,
>
> Thanks, that sounds like a MUCH easier way of doing things!
>
> A couple of questions:
>
> - I don't have much experience with virtual environments.  If I install
> one of your packages into a conda environment, will I still be able to
>   access applications & libraries that were installed outside of conda
>   (specifically Python, TensorFlow, CUDA & Docker)?  Or will I have to
> reinstall those resources inside the same conda environment as the GNU
>   Radio package?

Everything would have to be installed into the conda environment, assuming you 
want to use them in the same Python process. (You could probably get tricky 
with PYTHONPATH or something, but I sure wouldn't recommend it.) Tensorflow and 
CUDA stuff could be a little tough, because currently that requires mixing the 
conda-forge channel (community-supported, where uhd and gnuradio are) and the 
defaults channel (provided by Anaconda Inc., where tensorflow-gpu is 
available). Depending on how you install conda, you'll want to make sure you 
also have the defaults channel available at a lower priority than conda-forge:

conda config --append channels defaults

Then

conda install tensorflow-gpu

should work to get you everything (assuming you have the NVIDIA driver 
installed normally). It would be good to double-check my instructions by 
consulting some guides, e.g.:

https://docs.anaconda.com/anaconda/user-guide/tasks/tensorflow/

Assuming you mentioned Docker only as a way to get tensorflow set up with GPU 
support, then you shouldn't need it. Hopefully tensorflow-gpu will make it to 
conda-forge soon (the infrastructure needed to do the build has only recently 
been set up, and pytorch-gpu was added just today), and then installation will 
get even easier.

>  - Slightly off-topic, but still related:  As mentioned in my original
> post, I have already installed UHD & GNU Radio from source on my
> system.
> This was not done inside a virtual environment.  If I now want to
> uninstall
> those items, is it as simple as going into their respective "build"
> folders
> (e.g. ~/workarea-gnuradio/gnuradio/build) and running "sudo make
> uninstall"
>   and "sudo make clean"?  Or is there more to it than that?

That should clean up all of the installed files (the make uninstall part, clean 
would not be necessary), but configuration files and cache files would still 
remain. It's almost certainly not necessary to uninstall your other build while 
trying/using the conda one as I've never experienced interference of that 
flavor. What could cause trouble are the config/cache files that would remain 
either way. But now you know about that possibility and know to clean those out 
if there are any problems. Just make sure to activate your conda environment 
and you'll be good to go.

> Thanks,
> Brendan.

Cheers,
Ryan