My setup experience and guide to getting Gqrx working on a low powered netbook running mint 15

[richard didd]

Hi all

I am running Linux Mint 15 (RC) on an Aspire one netbook D250 and I thought id post my setup details and how I managed to get this software working.

1. I downloaded a script from http://www.sbrac.org/files/build-gnuradio
2. I then edited out the exit operation of the script when checking for the version of mint installed  (the script exits with an error message of 'you must have mint 11 or above to install).

I ran the script by ./build-gnuradio --verbose (verbose seems to correctly install all dependencies)

NOTE: the script will take a while to run and seems to install the gnuradio 64 bit version which is no good on a netbook that only runs 32 bit.
The script is still useful as it installs the RTL drivers and UHD.

3. I then downloaded and ran a script from http://jacobzelek.com/?p=257
This seems to install the 32 bit version of gnu radio.

Looking around the web I came across Gqrx software and downloaded the 32 bit version
4. I downloaded this along with installing libgnuradio-core-dev (mint seems to need this).

I was surprised to find that I did not need to compile the gqrx.pro, I just double clicked and the software ran up fine.
I didn't need to compile at all.

So now the software is working fine but runs really slowly.

Tips to optimizing Gqrx :-

1. set the sample rate to 1200000
2. change the FFT size to 512 and the fps to 5fps

Now Gqrx actually is usable on a 1Ghz  powered netbook.

What would be nice is to turn off the lower section of the FFT display but I can understand why it is needed.

If I have time, I may try to merge the two above scripts into an easy install script for low powered netbooks in the future.
The reason being is that with a netbook I can be portable and use Gqrx in remote locations (with a suitable antenna on the USB TV card).

These are just the tips that I have listed for myself and anyone else needs to set up in the future.

Thanks. keep up the excellent work on Gqrx

Rich

[richard didd]

Just an update.

Prior to running any script, mint will need the following installed

git cmake wget libcppunit-dev

This  makes installation less hassle

[Alexandru Csete]

Hi Rich,

Thanks for taking your time to write down these notes.
If I understand you correctly, you have installed gnuradio using a
script, then got one of the binary gqrx packages from sourceforge.
That's fine; however, since you now have gnuradio installed you may as
well try to build gqrx from source. If you do that you can always use
the latest code from the git repository.

By the way, the latest code in the git repository will let you switch
off the waterfall.

Alex

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[richard didd]

Thank you alex. I may just try that.

As I said in the previous post, the steps are a reminder for me as much as a guide for other users.
Ideally I would like to make a nice easy script that any user can run on any main distribution of linux that just installs everything needed.
Marcus leech script comes very close but does not install Gqrx.

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