minor doc tweak

[debian/gnuradio] / README

#
# Copyright 2001,2002,2003,2004,2005,2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
# 
# This file is part of GNU Radio
# 
# GNU Radio is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
# the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
# any later version.
# 
# GNU Radio is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
# GNU General Public License for more details.
# 
# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
# along with GNU Radio; see the file COPYING.  If not, write to
# the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street,
# Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.
# 

Welcome to GNU Radio!


As of August 3, 2006 we have restructured the GNU Radio build process
and moved the source code repository from CVS to subversion.

Please see http://gnuradio.org/trac for the wiki, bug tracking,
and source code viewer.

The bleeding edge code can be found in our subversion repository at
http://gnuradio.org/svn.  To checkout the latest, use this
command:

  $ svn co http://gnuradio.org/svn/gnuradio/trunk gnuradio

For information about subversion, please see:
  http://subversion.tigris.org/



GNU Radio is now distributed as one giant blob, instead of N smaller
blobs.  We believe that this will reduce some of the build problems
people were seeing.  Now you'll always get all of the code, and the
configure step will determine which components can be built on your
system.


How to Build GNU Radio:

  (1) Ensure that you've satisfied the external dependencies listed
      below.  The word "system" is used to mean "operating system
      and/or distribution", and means a full operating system,
      including kernel, user-space utilties, and a packaging system
      for additional software.  On Linux, this means what
      "distribution" means.

      With the exception of SDCC, the following GNU/Linux
      distributions are known to come with all required dependencies
      pre-packaged: Ubuntu 6.06, SuSE 10.0 (the pay version, not the
      free download), Fedora Core 5.  Other distribution may work too.
      We know these three are easy.  The required packages may be
      contained on your installation CD/DVD, or may be loaded over the
      net.  The specifics vary depending on your GNU/Linux
      distribution.

      On systems using pkgsrc (e.g. NetBSD and Dragonfly), build
      meta-packages/gnuradio, which will build a previous release and
      force installation of the dependencies.  Then pkg_delete the
      gnuradio and usrp packages, which will leave the dependencies.
      (This should also work on OSX.)

      See the wiki at http://gnuradio.org/trac/wiki for details.

      FIXME: update the wiki; talk about OS/X, NetBSD and MinGW too.

  (2) do the "usual dance"

      $ ./bootstrap        # not reqd when building from the tarball
      $ ./configure
      $ make && make check
      $ sudo make install


That's it!


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                       KNOWN INCOMPATIBILITIES


  GNU Radio triggers bugs in g++ 3.3 for X86.  DO NOT USE GCC 3.3 on
  the X86 platform.  g++ 3.2, 3.4, and the 4.* series are known to work well.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

                          External dependencies

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Prerequisites: Before trying to build these from source, please try
your system's installation tool (apt-get, pkg_install, YaST, yum,
urpmi, etc.) first.  Most recent systems have these packages
available.

You'll need to do a bit of sleuthing to figure out what your OS and
packaging system calls these.  If your system uses the convention of
splitting files needed to run programs compiled with foo and files
needed to do the compilation into packages named foo and foo-devel,
install both packages.  (Most GNU/Linux systems are like this, but
pkgsrc is not and instead uses -devel to indicate a package of a
not-yet-released or unstable version.)

For those using pkgsrc, see gnuradio-pkg_chk.conf.  Those not using
pkgsrc may also find the list useful.

(0) GNU make

It used to be required to have a "reasonable make", meaning GNU make,
BSD make, or perhaps Solaris make.  It is now required to use GNU
make.  Version 3.81 should certainly work; the intent is not to
require the bleeding edge.

Note that the examples below are written with "make".  They probably
should say "gmake", as GNU make is installed as gmake when it is not
the native make.

(1) The "autotools"

       autoconf 2.57    or later
       automake 1.7.4   or later
       libtool  1.5     or later

If your system has automake-1.4, there's a good chance it also has
automake-1.7 or later.  Check your install disk and/or (on GNU/Linux)
try:

  $ man update-alternatives

for info on how some distributions support multiple versions.


(2)  pkgconfig 0.15.0 or later  http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/pkgconfig

From the web site:

pkgconfig is a system for managing library compile/link flags that
works with automake and autoconf. It replaces the ubiquitous *-config
scripts you may have seen with a single tool.


(3)  FFTW 3.0 or later        http://www.fftw.org

IMPORTANT!!!  When building FFTW, you MUST use the --enable-single and
--enable-shared configure options.  This builds the single precision
floating point version which we use.  You should also use either the
--enable-3dnow or --enable-sse options if you're on an Athlon or Pentium
respectively.

[FIXME: GNU/Linux packages of single-precision fftw are typically called ??]

In systems using pkgsrc, install math/fftwf, which provides the
single-precision libraries.


(4) Python 2.3 or later       http://www.python.org

Python 2.3 or later is now required.  If your system splits
python into a bunch of separate packages including python-devel or
libpython you'll most likely need those too.


(5) Numpy python library   http://numeric.scipy.org

Provides a high performance array type for Python.
http://numpy.scipy.org
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369&package_id=175103

(6) The Boost C++ Libraries     http://www.boost.org

We use the Smart Pointer library.  Most systems already have the boost
libraries available.  In the unlikely event that yours doesn't,
download the source and follow the build instructions.  They're
different from the normal ./configure && make


(7) cppunit 1.9.14 or later.    http://cppunit.sourceforge.net

Unit testing framework for C++.


(8) Simple Wrapper Interface Generator.  http://www.swig.org

As of repository version 4045, gnuradio requires version 1.3.31 or newer.


(9) SDCC: Small Device C Compiler.  http://sdcc.sourceforge.net/

Use version 2.4.0 or later.

This includes a C compiler and linker for the 8051.  It's required to
build the firmware for the USRP.  If you don't have a USRP, don't
worry about it.

(10) Guile 1.6 or 1.8 

Scheme interpreter.  http://www.gnu.org/software/guile/guile.html



Optional, but nice to have:

(11) wxPython.  Python binding for the wxWidgets GUI framework.  Use
version 2.5.2.7 or later.  Again, almost all systems have this
available.

As a last resort, build it from source (not recommended!)
http://www.wxpython.org

(12) xmlto version ? or later.   http://cyberelk.net/tim/xmlto/index.html

Wrapper for XML conversion tools to ease e.g. making html from docbook.


----------------------------------------------------------------

If you've got doxygen installed and provide the --enable-doxygen
configure option, the build process creates documentation for the
class hierarchy etc.  Point your browser at
gnuradio/gnuradio-core/doc/html/index.html


To run the examples you'll need to set PYTHONPATH.  Note that the
prefix and python version number in the path needs to match your
installed version of python.

  $ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages

You may want to add this to your shell init file (~/.bash_profile if
you use bash).

Note that on Fedora Core 4 and 5 when running on X86_64 machines,
python is shippped with a strange (wrong) configuration that requires
you to add both the lib64 and lib paths to your PYTHONPATH.
E.g.,

  $ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib64/python2.4/site-packages:/usr/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages

[Don't complain to us, complain to the Fedora Core packagers.]


Another handy trick if for example your fftw includes and libs are
installed in, say ~/local/include and ~/local/lib, instead of
/usr/local is this:

    $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$HOME/local/lib
    $ make CPPFLAGS="-I$HOME/local/include"


Sometimes the prerequisites are installed in a location which is not
included in the default compiler and linker search paths.  This
happens with pkgsrc and NetBSD.  To build, tell configure to use these
locations:

        LDFLAGS="-L/usr/pkg/lib -R/usr/pkg/lib" CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/pkg/include" ./configure --prefix=/usr/gnuradio