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KB6NU's Ham Radio Blog

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Adventures in Linux

Posted: 06 Nov 2021 04:33 PM PDT http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/kb6nu/tVpu/~3/mIF-AUHzo40/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

A refurb HP Elite tower PC like this one has been running my shack computer
for nearly three years now.

Nearly three years ago now, I retired the cheap HP 2000 laptop I was using
in the shack with a refurbished HP Elite desktop computer. It has proven to
be a very good buy, easily powering the SmartSDR software that runs my Flex 6400 and all the other software that Ive thrown at it.

I still have the laptop. We used it for logging at Field Day a couple of
years ago, but aside from that rather light duty, its just been taking up space. Last December, I had tried to install Linux on this laptop, but when
I wasnt successful right off the bat, I put the box back on the shelf,
where it languished until about a month ago.

Thats when my friends over at the  Linux in the Ham Shack podcast
ran Episode #434: Linux Install Media Deep Dive. They made it sound
relatively easy, so I decided to give it another try.

The first thing that you have to decide—after youve decided to install
Linux, of course—is which distribution to install. I did a search for best linux for an old laptop, or something similar, and found the web page, Best Linux Distributions for An Old Laptop in 2021. Based upon what I read
there, I decided to give Bodhi Linux a try.

Following NE4RDs instructions, I first downloaded Rufus, a proram that
allows you to create bootable USB drives from .iso files. Then, I
downloaded the .iso file for Bodhi Linux and created the bootable USB
drive. So far, so good.

Unfortunately, the laptop didnt boot from the USB drive. When I tried to
boot from the USB drive, the laptop just went crazy. Thinking that it might
be the BIOS settings, I played around with them, but to no avail. I think
this is what tripped me up last December.

Poking around, I found a way to do it, however. What I had to do was to get into the BIOS without the USB drive being plugged in, then at the
appropriate step plug it in, then specify the EFI file to boot from. When I
did that it, worked!

I played around with Bodhi Linux for a a couple of days. I tried installing SDR++ because it was touted to be bloat free, but unfortunately, I couldnt
get it to work. I did install qgrx, and that worked just fine with my
RTL-SDR dongle. In the end, though, I decided that Bodhi Linux was a little
too new agey for me, and looked for another Linux distribution to install.

My second choice was Lubuntu. Lubuntu was touted as being fast and
lightweight, so I thought Id give it a go. Armed with my experience in installing Bodhi Linux, the Lubuntu install was easy. Again, I had no luck installing SDR++, but gqrx installed easily, and I quickly had it up and running.

A couple of days ago, however, I read about DragonOS Focal, which is an
Ubuntu Linux image that comes preinstalled with multiple SDR software
packages. According to the SourceForge page,

DragonOS Focal is an out-of-the-box Lubuntu 20.04 based x86_64 operating
system for anyone interested in software defined radios. [Dragon OS Focal includes] the bigger named packages and  drivers  for SDRs, such as the HackRF One, RTL-SDR, and LimeSDR.

srsLTE
Yate/YateBTS
Osmo-NITB
Universal Radio Hacker
GNU Radio
Aircrack-ng
GQRX
Kalibrate-hackrf
wireshare
gr-gsm
rtl-sdr
HackRF
IMSI-catcher
Zenmap
inspectrum
qspectrumanalyzer
LTE-Cell-Scanner
CubicSDR
Limesuite
ShinySDR
SDRAngel
SDRTrunk
Kismet
BladeRF
and more.



That looks pretty good, doesnt it?

I expected the install to go pretty much the same as the Lubuntu install,
but that was not to be. I downloaded the .iso file and created the bootable
USB drive with Rufus, but for some reason, I couldnt get that to boot.

Somehow, I got the idea to create the bootable USB drive on the Lubuntu
system using Balena Etcher. So, I downloaded the program and the .iso file
to the Lubuntu machine and created the bootable drive. This time, it worked like a charm!

Dragon OS has just finished installing itself, and Im rebooting now. Ill
report in future posts on how well the SDR programs run on this old laptop.



The post Adventures in Linux appeared first on KB6NUs Ham Radio Blog.

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