We've been using a bootable DVD for our private on-site training courses when our clients are in environments that do not allow using the Ettus Research LiveUSB drive. This has been useful enough that we've decided to make it publicly available as an ISO file download from the GNU Radio website.
This DVD allows you to test, explore, or demo GNU Radio applications on your PC without making any changes to your local hard drive. It is based on Ubuntu Linux Desktop 12.04.2 LTS 64-bit, which is a very stable platform to host GNU Radio applications. This distribution is updated with the latest packages from the Ubuntu repository at the time the ISO file is created. GNU Radio and 3rd-party libraries/applications have been installed using the PyBOMBS build system. Right now there are only a few: * GNU Radio 3.7.0git, commit v3.7.0-102-g631dd648, and dependencies * Ettus Research UHD 3.5.3, commit g95e6bfea, and dependencies * gr-osmosdr v0.1.0-8-ge97339c1, and dependencies * gqrx v2.2.0-1-gd2c92a21, and dependencies In addition to the standard applications which come with Ubuntu Desktop, some additional packages have been installed which are useful in the context of working with SDR: * Scientific Python (python-scipy) * python-matplotlib * GNU Octave 3.2 * GNU Plot 4.4.3 * Emacs 23 Our plan right now is to ensure this basic functionality is working, based on user feedback, then to add other PyBOMBS-defined recipes and application packages as requested and update the ISO image every few weeks. This is an alternative to the Ettus Research LiveUSB. That product provides a much faster USB 3.0-based system, with persistence, and can be used as a regular development environment. It comes with a newer release of Ubuntu Linux and a large variety of 3rd-party application code that uses GNU Radio. It's what we we usually work with when teaching our standard GNU Radio courses. However, the LiveDVD is great for use in restricted environments where USB drives are not allowed, or to just have something to boot from to try something out with a different PC. There are a few things to note about using this LiveDVD image. First, system performance will be highly dependent on the speed of your computer's DVD drive. Boot times are typically a couple minutes to get to the main screen. Execution of commands or applications the first time are slow, but as these get cached in RAM, they become as fast as a normal hard drive based system. With read-only media, of course, there is no persistence. The Ubuntu LiveDVD system uses RAM to hold filesystem writes to give the appearance of a read-write drive, but any changes are lost upon reboot. You can access the local hard drive of a system through the file manager and use that to store anything you want to save. Finally, this DVD is not an installer for Ubuntu and does not have the ability to transfer its contents to the local hard drive. The ISO image is available via HTTP (2.5 GB) and via BitTorrent. The GNU Radio server's CloudFlare CDN will *not* cache the direct downloads, so please use a BitTorrent client whenever possible and access the following link (beware of line wrap): http://gnuradio.org/releases/gnuradio/iso/ubuntu-12.04.2-desktop-amd64-gnuradio-2013-0817.torrent The direct link is at the same URL but with the extension renamed from 'torrent' to 'iso'. (We're still deciding the best way to make this large file available, so these URLs may change in the future.) You will need to burn a DVD with this image using a disc writing tool, and may also need to configure your system BIOS to be able to boot from a CD instead of a hard drive. Details of how to do those are easily found through Google. The DVD will boot directly to a plain vanilla desktop, and from there you can open a terminal to execute commands. More documentation will follow on the gnuradio.org wiki. Feedback is most welcome. -- Johnathan Corgan, Corgan Labs SDR Training and Development Services http://corganlabs.com Visit us at GRCON13 Oct. 1-4 http://ow.ly/ntmpL
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