Aug 27 – 31, 2024
FAIR - Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe GmbH
Europe/Berlin timezone

Software Prerequisites for the Tutorials

We are all looking forward to seeing you all very soon at the European GNURadio Days 2024!

This information is intended to allow you to prepare your computer for the Tutorial sessions of the event, so we can directly jump into the topics. Ideally you should set this up before traveling to the event. If you encounter any problems, don’t hesitate to contact the organisers.
While you’ll only strictly need the setup for the tutorial track you have chosen, don’t hesitate to also prepare the other setup.

User Tutorial Sessions

The user tutorial session will work with gnuradio 3.10. To ensure that everyone is working with the same setup and directly has all the example flowgraphs available, we provide a VirtualBox VM image and an equivalent WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux 2) root filesystem layer for you to download.

VirtualBox Instructions

Install VirtualBox version 7.0 with extension pack ( https://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/7.0.20/Oracle_VM_VirtualBox_Extension_Pack-7.0.20.vbox-extpack or virtualbox-ext-pack on Debian/GNU Linux), import the virtual machine image ( https://dl.wirew0rm.de/GNURadio310.ova or https://filesender.renater.fr/?s=download&token=6b5ffefe-b367-4add-8622-b454146d1820 ) and play.
The user will be automatically logged in when started.
Keyboard layout rotates between English (default), German and French with Shift-Alt.
Please check that you comply with VirtualBox’s License Terms for the free version or obtain a paid license.
There are reports that VirtualBox and WSL2 usage do not work together very well.

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 instructions

Download the custom wsl2 rootfs ( https://sf.gsi.de/d/780d34d62fac4424ae90/ or https://dl.wirew0rm.de/GR-user-tutorials-wsl2-rootfs.tar.gz ), then open Windows Power Shell and run:

PS C:\Users\alex> wsl --update
PS C:\Users\alex> wsl --import GRdays2024 ./WSL ./GR-user-tutorials-wsl2-rootfs.tar.gz --version 2
PS C:\> wsl -u user -d GRdays2024
$ gnuradio-companion

Developer Tutorial Sessions

This section will help you to set up a basic development environment for the GNURadio 4.0 codebase.

Docker CLI

To just compile GNURadio4 without installing any dependencies you can just use the Docker image which is also used by our CI builds. The snippet below uses docker run to start the container with the current directory mapped into the container with the correct user and group IDs.
It then compiles the project and runs the testsuite.
Note that while the binaries inside of ./build can be accessed on the host system, they are linked against the libraries of the container and will most probably not run on the host system.

git clone git@github.com:fair-acc/gnuradio4.git
me@host$ cd gnuradio4
me@host$ docker run \
    --user `id -u`:`id -g` \
    --volume="/etc/group:/etc/group:ro" \
    --volume="/etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro" \
    --volume="/etc/shadow:/etc/shadow:ro" \
    --workdir=/build --volume `pwd`:/build  -it \
    ghcr.io/fair-acc/gr4-build-container bash

me@aba123ef$ # export CXX=c++ # uncomment to use clang
me@aba123ef$ cmake -S . -B build
me@aba123ef$ cmake --build build
me@aba123ef$ cd build && ctest .

Docker IDE

Some IDEs provide a simple way to specify a docker container to use for building and executing a project. For example in JetBrains CLion you can set this up in Settings->Build,Execution,Deployment->Toolchains->[+]->Docker, leaving everything as the default except for setting Image to ghcr.io/fair-acc/gr4-build-container.
By default this will use the gcc-14 compiler included in the image, by setting CXX to clang++-18 you can also use clang.

Native

To be able to natively compile some prerequisites have to be installed:

  • gcc >= 13 and/or clang >= 17
  • cmake >= 3.25.0
  • ninja (or GNU make)
  • optional for python block support: python3
  • optional for soapy (limesdr,rtlsdr) blocks: soapysdr
  • optional for compiling to webassembly: emscripten >= 3.1.50

To apply the project’s formatting rules, you’ll also need the correct formatters, clang-format-18 and cmake-format. With these installed you can use the scripts in the repository to reformat your changes. Otherwise

Once these are installed, you should be able to just compile and run GNURadio4:

git clone git@github.com:fair-acc/gnuradio4.git
me@host$ cd gnuradio4
me@host$ cmake -S . -B build
me@host$ cmake --build build
me@host$ cd build && ctest .

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

Fist open Windows Power Shell from the windows menu and run the following commands there:

$ wsl --install -d Ubuntu-24.04
# set user and password
# or $ wsl -u <username> -d Ubuntu-24.04 # if the distribution is already installed
$ cd # switch to the home directory (or any other directory inside the wsl2 image, building in directories mounted from windows's filesystem is very slow)
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install build-essential gcc-14 g++-14 cmake ninja-build libssl-dev
$ git clone https://github.com/fair-acc/gnuradio4.git
$ cd gnuradio4
$ cmake -B build -S .
$ cmake --build build -j 2
$ ctest --test-dir build