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Getting Started: Linux Live Images

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Jon Szymaniak edited this page Jan 7, 2015 · 11 revisions

This page provides some information and links to Live Linux DVDs or USB images that include bladeRF support.

This is a great place to start if you are new to Linux, and is a better choice than using a virtual machine for a few reasons:

  • SDR support and applications are pre-installed
  • All of your CPU and RAM are dedicated to the OS, rather than splitting between a guest and host.
  • It's very portable!
    • You can often create persistent data region on live USB sticks to save your changes to the image
  • The quality and reliability of USB pass-through support varies across different VM software offerings.

Table of Contents

Creating Live DVDs and USB Sticks

There are a myriad of useful resources regarding burning ISOs to DVDs and preparing bootable USB sticks on the web. Below are a just a few guides. Feel free to add any guides you've found helpful!

  • An Ubuntu community wiki page on burning ISOs to DVDs.
    • This covers Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux.
  • An Ubuntu guide on creating a bootable USB sticks
    • You may need to run the following to install the Startup Disk Creator: 
      $ sudo apt-get install usb-creator-gtk
    • Note the option to reserve extra space . This allows you to make persistent changes to the image, for example, installing your favorite packages or program configurations. This is highly recommended!
  • An Arch wiki page on creating USB flash installation media
    • This is a very complete guide, which includes details for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems, as well as various programs.
  • A Gentoo wiki guide on creating a Live USB stick
  • UNetBootin - A cross platform tool for creating bootable USB drives.
  • USBWriter - A Windows tool for writing bootable images to USB drives.

Live Distros

GNU Radio Live SDR Environment

From the GNU Radio Live SDR Environment wiki page:

"The GNU Radio Live SDR Environment, produced by Corgan Labs, is a bootable Ubuntu Linux DVD with GNU Radio and third party software pre-installed. It is designed for quick and easy testing and experimentation with GNU Radio without having to make any permanent modifications to a PC or laptop."

The current version (containing GNU Radio 3.7.6), contains bladeRF support from changeset 06703b23.

The FPGA images are included in /usr/share/Nuand/bladeRF and will be automatically loaded when a device is opened. If you wish to use different FPGA images, you can place them in ~/.config/Nuand/bladeRF/.

If you're using a USB drive for persistance, you may find it helpful to install indicator-cpufreq and then log out and back in (or reboot), as shown below. This adds a CPU monitor that allows you to quickly configure your CPUs for "performance" rather than "ondemand," effectively disabling CPU frequency scaling. While running flowgraphs, if you hear choppy audio or occasionally see dropped packets, this is worth a shot. 

ubuntu@ubuntu $ sudo apt-get install indicator-cpufreq

Pentoo

Coming soon...

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