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Getting Started: Linux Live Images

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Jon Szymaniak edited this page Jan 22, 2015 · 11 revisions

This page provides some information and links to Live Linux DVDs or USB images that include bladeRF support.

This is a great place to start if you are new to Linux, and is a better choice than using a virtual machine for a few reasons:

  • SDR support and applications are pre-installed
  • All of your CPU and RAM are dedicated to the OS, rather than splitting between a guest and host.
  • It's very portable!
    • You can often create persistent data region on live USB sticks to save your changes to the image
  • The quality and reliability of USB pass-through support varies across different VM software offerings.

Table of Contents

Creating Live DVDs and USB Sticks

There are a myriad of useful resources regarding burning ISOs to DVDs and preparing bootable USB sticks on the web. Below are a just a few guides. Feel free to add any guides you've found helpful!

  • An Ubuntu community wiki page on burning ISOs to DVDs.
    • This covers Windows, Mac OS X, and Ubuntu Linux.
  • An Ubuntu guide on creating a bootable USB sticks
    • You may need to run the following to install the Startup Disk Creator: 
      $ sudo apt-get install usb-creator-gtk
    • Note the option to reserve extra space . This allows you to make persistent changes to the image, for example, installing your favorite packages or program configurations. This is highly recommended!
  • An Arch wiki page on creating USB flash installation media
    • This is a very complete guide, which includes details for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux operating systems, as well as various programs.
  • A Gentoo wiki guide on creating a Live USB stick
  • UNetBootin - A cross platform tool for creating bootable USB drives.
  • USBWriter - A Windows tool for writing bootable images to USB drives.

Live Distros

Below are live Linux images that contain bladeRF support.

The FPGA images are included in /usr/share/Nuand/bladeRF and will be automatically loaded when a device is opened. If you wish to use different FPGA images, you can place them in ~/.config/Nuand/bladeRF/.

GNU Radio Live SDR Environment

From the GNU Radio Live SDR Environment wiki page:

"The GNU Radio Live SDR Environment, produced by Corgan Labs, is a bootable Ubuntu Linux DVD with GNU Radio and third party software pre-installed. It is designed for quick and easy testing and experimentation with GNU Radio without having to make any permanent modifications to a PC or laptop."

The current version (containing GNU Radio 3.7.6), contains bladeRF support from changeset 06703b23.

Pentoo

bladeRF support is now included in Pentoo, a security-focused live Linux image based upon Gentoo. See the Pentoo blog and downloads page for more information.

The 2015 RC3.7 Pentoo release includes:

  • bladeRF-cli v0.12.0 (2014.11-rc3 release)
  • libbladeRF v0.17.0 (2014.11-rc3 release)
  • FPGA bitstream v0.1.1
  • FX3 firmware version 1.7.1
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