Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Basic analog USRP2 transmitter

[alexander levedahl]

Looking through those instructions I realized why Microsoft makes so much money, when you install programs on a windows machine the OS does it for you, whereas with linux it requires knowing what a tarball is, what cloning a repository means, what a git viewer is, what this sentence means "It will show you all of the branching and merging, diffs, etc.", comprehending "./bootstrap", and whether or not you need to run that command, comprehending "./configure", comprehending "make", knowing what to do if when you try and run "sudo" that fails, and how to give an account sudo privelege, comprehending "git clean -d -x -f", comprehending "yum install qt4-devel qwt-devel qwtplot3d-qt4-devel PyQt4-devel", knowing what bootstrap, configure, make means.  When I clicked on the "Fedora installation instructions" page it gets even worse:

yum install gnuradio usrp
Some one who doesn't know that installing stuff for USRP does not install it for USRP2 will run this and then become confused.

$ yum groupinstall "Engineering and Scientific" "Development Tools" 
$ yum install fftw-devel cppunit-devel wxPython-devel libusb-devel \
  guile boost-devel alsa-lib-devel numpy gsl-devel python-devel pygsl \
  python-cheetah python-lxml PyOpenGL 
$ yum install PyQt4-devel qwt-devel qwtplot3d-qt4-devel (The pkg names depend on the version of Fedora.  These work for 12)

WTF?

And then there is a set of instructions on what to do for the USRP but not the USRP2, for someone NOT familiar with linux, they will get lost at this point.  But lets say that we have USRP,

The version of sdcc packaged for Fedora 11 (2.9.0) does not work with GNU Radio 3.2. It is possible to use the version packaged for Fedora 10 (2.8.0) available for i386 and x86_64. Alternatively sdcc 2.9.0 can be compiled from source available here.

On earlier versions of Fedora you have to download the _Small Device C Compiler, build and install yourself.

will drive anyone NOT FAMILIAR with linux nuts.  Windows comes with a couple of different versions and does its best to not make the above problems apparent, such that if I have software that was designed for windows '98, it won't fail for windows '98 version 1.1, and will still work on XP and possibly Vista and 7.

Based on the linux commands I saw, if one mistake gets made, everything will get screwed up and, unless that user has a high degree of familiarity with linux, this problem will sit there and never be resolved.

Alex

P.S. You might be able to avoid a lot of these problems if you wrote a tutorial on how to write a python script that does this instead of an infinite number of tutorials on how to write a python script that transmits 350Hz and 440Hz tones over speakers and a grc diagram that transmits the same tones over the air.