I have a small Chromebook where I have installed Linux that I use as my amateur radio computer. I like the small form factor and that it’s battery lasts for 6-8 hours. Recharging in the field it is a pain since it has a 19V power supply. I bought a 12V to 19V boost convertor that I need to wire up one of these days.
It was time to update my installs of Fldigi, wsjtx and various other digital modes and I soon discovered that the standard places to get linux packages apparently haven’t been updated in many years. This is disappointing and something I think organizntions like the ARRL, TAPR and others should try to support / encourage. (Maybe I’m totally overlooking something obvious, let me know if so!)
Here’s what I ended up doing to get the latest version of Fldigi working under Ubuntu.
I download the source bundle from http://www.w1hkj.com/files/fldigi/
In my case the latest was
- fldigi-4.1.14.tar.gz
I download this and then extracted the source
tar -xf fldigi-4.1.14.tar.gz cd fldigi-4.1.14
I then ran the configure scripts to figure out what else I needed to download / install
./configure
Everyone’s system is going to be different so your error messages and missing dependencies will vary from mine.
I ended up doing a series of installs and compiling steps to get all the dependencies installed.
You may have luck using apt-get to install the dependencies though may need to play around with the naming conventions to find the right package.
For example, I needed libpng according to the build errors, but to satisfy that requirement I need to install libpng-dev
sudo apt-get install libpng-dev
Other dependencies needed the pre-fix “lib” put in the front of it or the “-dev” suffix added to the end. In some cases a version number needed to be added like for “libportaudiocpp0”
once the dependencies were satisfied
make clean sudo make install
It took a bunch of iterations but I was able to get the latest Fldigi running on my system. Audio configuration is STILL a pain under Linux, “with great flexibility comes great annoyance”, and ate a few more hours of my life!
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