I just came across Skywave, a packaged Linux distribution for SDR with some ham radio bits as well. I’ve only found one mention of it, in passing, so I thought I’d point it out. You can find it on SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/skywavelinux/, or at its “home” at https://skywavelinux.com . It’s built on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, if anyone cares about those details.
It comes with a number of pre-installed SDR programs, includes LimeSuite in its programmer tools, and theoretically can be run as a Live Distro from a USB stick. I ended up installing it on an old laptop, and have been able to add a few other pieces since, such as SDRangel. For Windows users who’d like to try it, you may be able to make it work with YUMI (I had poor success) or burn a bootable DVD and then use the included installer program to make a bootable “live” USB to try this without having to install it. In theory you should be able to use YUMI to create a USB stick with persistence, so that you can install a bunch of stuff (SDRangel, the SoapySDR AirspyHF plugin) and have it stick around on your next boot. I’m a Linux rookie, so if someone else can figure out how to do this and advise us, that’d be great!
I’d love to see the distro itself come with SDRangel pre-compiled, and also with the SoapySDR AirspyHF plugin. If someone knows how to make that happen, or the right way of contacting the “owner”, that’d be great!
I’m sure everyone here knows more about Linux than I do, but if that’s not the case and you’ve had a hankering to take it for a spin, this might be a good way to do that.
I’d love to see the distro itself come with SDRangel pre-compiled, and also with the SoapySDR AirspyHF plugin. If someone knows how to make that happen, or the right way of contacting the “owner”, that’d be great!
The way things usually happen is someone puts in some effort to package and test the application.
Now this being open-source software everyone is welcome and even encouraged to take a stab at the problem. Keep in mind most amateur radio developers do this as a hobby and not a full time job, so a single person cannot sustain a big project long-time and also will work on it only whenever he has some time to kill
I’ll take a look at it…It may be worth pursuing and I have a spare machine capable of loading this OS on and then adding SDRAngel to it. I’ll let you know what I find, but it may take a few days to make that happen…Stay tuned…
I appreciate that most people use Ubuntu and I do also with 2 x86_64 boxes and a number of ARM SBC’s.
My main workhorses are 3 openSUSE x86_64 boxes and 1 laptop where all the SDR apps are provided, currently maintained and regularly updated. In general openSUSE is kept up to date and still rock stable despite many thousands of updates rolling out weekly and daily.
Over many years I only do a fresh install of openSUSE if I upgrade hard drives whilst on the other hand Ubuntu upgrades eventually break and demand a fresh install.
