Building and Installing the USRP Open-Source Toolchain (UHD and GNU Radio) on Linux

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Application Note Number

AN-445

Revision History

Date Author Details
2016-05-01 Neel Pandeya Initial creation

Abstract

This Application Note provides a comprehensive, start-to-finish, step-by-step guide for building, installing, and maintaining the open-source toolchain for the USRP (UHD and GNU Radio) from source code on the Linux platform. The Ubuntu and Fedora distributions are specifically discussed. Other alternate installation methods are also discussed.

http://files.ettus.com/manual/page_build_guide.html#build_instructions_unix

UHD on Linux

UHD is fully supported on Linux, using the GCC compiler, and should work on most major Linux distributions.

Devices

This document applies only to the USRP X300, X310, B200, B210, B200mini, N200, N210 devices. The E310 and E312 devices are embedded devices, and are fundamentally different from the other non-embedded USRP devices, and are not addressed by this document.

Using a Virtual Machine (VM)

UHD may be installed and run within a Virtual Machine (VM), such as VMware and VirtualBox. There are some special issues to address when running UHD within a VM, and these are discussed in a separate Appliaction Note. If you are using VirtualBox, we recommend using version 5.x.

Install Linux

If you already have a recent version of Linux installed, then you may be able to skip this section. If you are starting from scratch, or simply want to start with a fresh new installation of Linux, then please follow the instructions and recommendations in this section.

We suggest that you use either Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, Fedora 21, Fedora 22, Fedora 23, and that you use a 64-bit architecture, not a 32-bit architecture. There are several re-spins of Ubuntu, such as Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, all of which should also work. For the purposes of this document, these re-spins can be considered equivalent. Other recent versions of Ubuntu such as 14.10, 15.04, 15.10 should also work. Both Ubuntu and Fedora are known to work well with UHD and GNU Radio.

Download and install Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, or Fedora from the links below. Download the appropriate ISO image, and write it to a USB flash drive. Be sure to verify that the ISO file was not corrupted during the download process by checking the MD5 and/or SHA1 hash.

You can learn more about Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Mint, and Fedora at the links below.

There are many tools for writing an ISO image to a USB flash drive. In Linux, you can use the "dd" utility, or the UNetbootin utility. On Ubuntu systems, there is also the Startup Disk Creator utility as well.

Be sure to use a USB flash drive with at least 8 GB capacity, and use a USB 3.0 flash drive, not a USB 2.0 flash drive. If you use a slower USB 2.0 flash drive, then the install process will take significantly longer.

Update and Install dependencies

Before building UHD and GNU Radio, you need to make sure that all the dependencies are first installed.

However, before installing any dependencies, you should first make sure that all the packages that are already installed on your system are up-to-date. You can do this from a GUI, or from the command-line, as shown below.

On Ubuntu systems, run: 

   sudo apt-get update

On Fedora systems, run: 

   sudo yum update
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