Installation¶

There are many ways to install gr-gsm:

• Manual compilation and installation
• Installation from distribution's packages
• Compilation and installation with use of Pybombs installation manager

Manual compilation and installation¶

Currently manual method of installation is considered to be the easiest way to get newest version of gr-gsm up and running. The gr-gsm repository contains automatic tests of manual installation in form of dockerfiles that are built and executed by Travis CI continuous integration service. Travis CI informs if particular revision of gr-gsm builds and passes tests on a set of GNU/Linux distributions. History of the results can be checked on the gr-gsm's Travis CI page.

The instructions presented here are a version of dockerfiles with stripped instructions specific to docker and without running unit tests. This wiki might at some moment be behind installation procedures contained in the dockerfiles so in case of installation problems it is a good idea to look in there.

In general to install gr-gsm installation of folowing dependencies is required:

• GNU Radio with header files
• development tools: git, cmake, autoconf, libtool, pkg-config, g++, gcc, make, libc6 with headers, libcppunit with headers, swig, doxygen, liblog4cpp with headers, python-scipy
• gr-osmosdr
• libosmocore with header files

After installing them download the gr-gsm's source and build it with following commands:

git clone https://git.osmocom.org/gr-gsm
cd gr-gsm
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/
make

and as root:

make install
ldconfig

To speedup compilation instead of "make" you can use parallel build

make -j $nproc

where "$nproc" is number of CPU cores. The "mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/" line is there because without it parallel build sometimes fails.

Self-contained installation instructions for particular distributions that are tested with use of Travis CI are presented below.

Debbian-based distributions (Debian Testing, Ubuntu 16.04+, Kali Rolling Edition)¶

Install all needed prerequisites with following command ('sudo' is needed on Ubuntu based distributions, on other distributions it should be omitted and commands starting with 'sudo' should be executed with superuser rights):

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get install -y \
    cmake \
    autoconf \
    libtool \
    pkg-config \
    build-essential \
    python-docutils \
    libcppunit-dev \
    swig \
    doxygen \
    liblog4cpp5-dev \
    python-scipy \
    python-gtk2 \
    gnuradio-dev \
    gr-osmosdr \
    libosmocore-dev

Then download the gr-gsm's source and build it with following commands:

git clone https://git.osmocom.org/gr-gsm
cd gr-gsm
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

To speedup compilation instead of "make" you can use parallel build

make -j $nproc

where "$nproc" is number of CPU cores. The "mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/" line is there because without it parallel build sometimes fails.

Fedora 26¶

Install all needed prerequisites with following command invoked with root's rights:

dnf install -y \
    gcc-c++ \
    make \
    cmake \
    pkgconfig \
    boost-devel \
    gnuradio-devel \
    libosmocore-devel \
    gr-osmosdr \
    swig \
    doxygen \
    python2-docutils \
    cppunit-devel

Then download the gr-gsm's source and build it with following commands:

git clone https://git.osmocom.org/gr-gsm
cd gr-gsm
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/
make

and as root:

make install
ldconfig

To speedup compilation instead of "make" you can use parallel build

make -j $nproc

where "$nproc" is number of CPU cores. The "mkdir $HOME/.grc_gnuradio/ $HOME/.gnuradio/" line is there because without it parallel build sometimes fails.

Installation from packages on Debian Testing and Ubuntu 18.04+¶

Thanks to work of Petter Reinholdtsen gr-gsm has packages for Debian Testing that were subsequently included in Ubuntu starting from 18.04. On these systems gr-gsm can be installed by simply doing:

sudo apt-get install gr-gsm

As of gr-gsm's version 0.41.2 grgsm_livemon application doesn't work because of change of PyQT version in current Debian Testing and Ubuntu 18.04. In order to use this program you can generate new version out of "grgsm_livemon.grc":

wget http://git.osmocom.org/gr-gsm/plain/apps/grgsm_livemon.grc
grcc -d . grgsm_livemon.grc
mv grgsm_livemon.py grgsm_livemon

Then move the grgsm_livemon file into a directory in the search path, i.e. /usr/local/bin.

Compilation and installation with use of Pybombs¶

The pybombs installation is broken because mainline gr-gsm is not compatible with GNU Radio 3.8 yet.

Pybombs is GNU Radio project's installation manager that installs GNU Radio and related projects, gr-gsm included. In times when distributions provided too old GNU Radio, pybombs offered the most straightforward way of installing gr-gsm as it automagically compiles newest GNU Radio and all other gr-gsm's prerequisites. Pybombs is doing quite complex work of figuring out what too install from packages of distribution and what to compile. Failures to install gr-gsm with use of pybombs were quite widespread among gr-gsm users due to many reasons. Some of them (in addition to general issues of gr-gsm installation):

• head of GNU Radio's master branch not compiling due to ongoing development,
• issues in pybombs resulting from intensive changes in the project,
• small set of distributions on which pybombs is regularly tested (i.e. never ending problems on Kali Linux that is distribution of choice for many of gr-gsm's users due to some unknown reason).

For installation of pybombs you will need git. On Debian based distributions you can get it with:

sudo apt-get install git python-pip

Then install pybombs with following command:

sudo pip install PyBOMBS

Then configure installation prefix (here ~/gr_prefix directory is used - it can be changed to any other path, 'myprefix' is the name of the prefix and it also can be changed):

pybombs auto-config
pybombs recipes add-defaults
pybombs prefix init ~/gr_prefix -a myprefix -R gnuradio-default

Then build and install gr-gsm in 'myprefix' with following command:

pybombs -p myprefix install gr-gsm

Pybombs will take care of downloading all of required libraries and for installation of GNU Radio and building gr-gsm.

It is required to have approximately 3.5GB of free space in the prefix directory as everything will be built in there.

In order to use gr-gsm installed in the prefix, environment variables (PATH, PYTHONPATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LIBRARY_PATH) need to be set with following command (for bash):
source ~/gr_prefix/setupenv.sh

To get the environment variables loaded on every launching of a bash terminal add 'source ~/gr_prefix/setupenv.sh' command at the end of a '.bashrc' file:
echo 'source ~/gr_prefix/setupenv.sh' >> ~/.bashrc