GNU Radio

[Lamar Owen]

On Monday 31 December 2007, Debarshi 'Rishi' Ray wrote:
> > Before I go into the whole process of coming up to speed with the Fedora
> > packaging guidelines, etc, I wanted to ask here if anyone else here is
> > working on GNU Radio packages for Fedora.
>
> GNU Radio is there on the WishList:
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WishList and no one
> has claimed it there yet.

Yeah, I saw it on the Wishlist, but didn't know if it had yet been claimed.

The only potential snags I know of with it are the two firmware files needed 
for the usrp portion of the package; the one is the firmware for the USB 
device controller on the USRP, which is easily generated with the free 
toolchain 'sdcc' already in Fedora, and thus isn't probably a snag at all.

On the other hand, the FPGA bitstream, while it itself is open and the verilog 
source is GPL'd, it needs a non-Free toolchain (Quartus II; although the web 
edition is no-cost, it is not Free) to build.  Prebuilt FPGA bitstreams meet 
the requirements mentioned in the Firmware section of the packaging 
guidelines on the wiki, as far as I can tell, but I would certainly submit 
whether that is the case or not to the group.

I actively use GNURadio here, and have the USRP hardware on which to test 
builds and such.  Learning this new build system will be what will challenge 
me the most; it does appear to be a timesaving system, though, and quite well 
thought-out (back in the day, I built PostgreSQL RPMs on the actual target 
platform; even if that meant pressing an old 486 into use, which I did, 
frequently, for Red Hat 6.2 builds (when Red Hat 9 was Old Hat and Fedora 
Core 1 was the talk of the town); Mock looks like it makes builds so much 
easier and more automatic; I still remember taking a full weekend to get all 
the builds done for all the archs I supported).
-- 
Lamar Owen
Chief Information Officer
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute
1 PARI Drive
Rosman, NC  28772
(828)862-5554
www.pari.edu