Introduction

Here are the instructions on installing RTL-SDR on a Linux Box

Assumption

I am going to assume that you know a bit about Linux like building a CentOS box, adding accounts, and setting IP addresses.  These tasks are out of scope for this document.

Build the CentOS box

We need to start somewhere, so we will start with a CentOS 7.6.1810 Linux box with at least 4GB of RAM with a GNOME desktop and Development tools.

More packages will be added later

Set preferences

After you build your box configure it as needed per your personal preferences  and procedures.   Couple things you should do though

• User accounts – make sure to add the users who will access the RTL-SDR device to the dialout group

  sudo usermod -G wheel,dialout larry

• You should not have to disable the firewall or SELinux to go through these procedures
• Patch your system

  sudo yum -y update

• Make sure your system has the proper drivers and has Internet access.

At this point you have CentOS 7 basic GUI/dev install with update to date patches

After a reboot your system , we will begin the actual install.

Install Additional CentOS packages

Install these additional packages from the base centos repository

sudo yum install libusb-devel git automake pulseaudio-libs-devel gtk3 gtk3-devel freeglut freeglut-devel gcc-c++ \
gcc kernel-devel qt5-qtsvg fftw libstdc++ systemd-devel libusb1-devel

Install Packages from EPEL

The of the rtl software come from epel repository, although audicity is not required, it does help when analyzing some recorded files,  cmake3 and the rtl-sdr dev files are need to compile some of the code we use.

sudo yum install epel-release
sudo yum install rtl-sdr.x86_64 rtl-sdr-devel audacity cmake3 

Configure Drivers/Modules for RTL

File tweaks load and give proper permissions for the RTL device and prevent the wrong module from installing

After installing rtl-sdr copy the rtl-sdr rules to the udev folder

sudo cp /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/10-rtl-sdr.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

Edit the file using sudo

sudo vi /etc/udev/rules.d/10-rtl-sdr.rules

Use the following command in vi to add the dialout group before the ENV section on the file

:%s/, ENV/, GROUP="dialout", ENV/g 

Now you have to make sure the dvb driver does not load, failure to do this will cause your system to reboot when accessing the RTL device

Create a blacklist file in modprobe.d

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-rtl.conf

The only thing needed in that file is the following single line

blacklist dvb_usb_rtl28xxu

Shared Library Locations

As we add these software packages, the will write libraries to a pair of directories. You will need to specify where libraries are, you can do that now so you won’t have to do it later.

Create a local.conf file

sudo vi /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf

And add these two simple lines to it

/usr/local/lib64
/usr/local/lib

Reboot and Validate

Reboot to enable the rtl drives and permissions

At this point, the rtl-sdr should be working via command line.  Test it by using the following command

rtl_test -t

If your system reboots inadvertently, check “Configure Drivers/Modules for RTL” section in this document 

Also make sure the account you are using is in the dialout group and the rtl-sdr.rules file has the ialout group in it.

If the test passes, at this point you can do command line rtl_sdr stuff lice recording FM stations

Download the sources

Now we can use wget and git to download the source code we need

Go to your home directory and create a folder called src, we are going to use this folder to do all are work.  Then download all of the files and source code

 cd
 mkdir src
 cd src
 git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDR.git
 git clone https://github.com/jgaeddert/liquid-dsp
 wget https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/releases/download/v3.1.2/wxWidgets-3.1.2.tar.bz2
 git clone https://github.com/cjcliffe/CubicSDR.git
 git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapyRTLSDR.git
 git clone https://github.com/pothosware/SoapySDRPlay.git
 git clone https://github.com/myriadrf/LimeSuite.git 

Install CubicSDR

This section is pretty long, but this is the meat of the install.  But most of these have a similar install process, you should be able to copy and paste each section

Install SoapySDR

Here are the steps

cd ~/src/SoapySDR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

The following command tests it

SoapySDRUtil --info 

Install liquid-dsp

Here are the steps

cd ~/src/liquid-dsp
./bootstrap.sh
CFLAGS="-march=native -O3" ./configure --enable-fftoverride 
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Install wxWidgets

This is probably the one component that takes the longest to compile

cd ~/src
tar -xvjf wxWidgets-3.1.2.tar.bz2  
cd wxWidgets-3.1.2/
mkdir -p ~/Develop/wxWidgets-staticlib
./autogen.sh 
./configure --with-opengl --disable-shared --enable-monolithic --with-libjpeg --with-libtiff --with-libpng \
--with-zlib --disable-sdltest --enable-unicode --enable-display --enable-propgrid --disable-webkit --disable-webview \
--disable-webviewwebkit --prefix=/home/user/Develop/wxWidgets-staticlib CXXFLAGS="-std=c++0x"
make -j4
sudo make install

Install the SDRplay API

Using a browser, download the following and install

http://www.sdrplay.com/linuxdl.php

Assuming you downloaded it into the src directory change perms and run

cd ~/src
chmod +x SDRplay_RSP_API-Linux-2.13.1.run
sudo ./SDRplay_RSP_API-Linux-2.13.1.run

Unfortunately you have to reinstall SoapySDR because some files were overwritten when installing the SDRplay API

cd ~/src/SoapySDR/build
sudo make install

Test Again

SoapySDRUtil --info

Here are some support modules for the SoapSDR.  Test each module after install to validate your are on the right track

Install the SoapyRTLSDR module

Here are the steps

cd ~/src/SoapyRTLSDR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Test

SoapySDRUtil --info

Install the SoapySDRPlay module

Here are the steps

cd ~/src/SoapySDRPlay
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Test

SoapySDRUtil --info

Install the Limesuite Module

Here are the Steps

cd ~/src/LimeSuite
mkdir builddir
cd builddir
cmake3 .. -DENABLE_EXAMPLES=off -DENABLE_GUI=off -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make
RESULT=SoapySDRUtil --sparse --info | grep "Search path:"; MODULEPATH=${RESULT:12}; sudo cp SoapyLMS7/libLMS7Support.so $MODULEPATH
sudo ldconfig

Test

SoapySDRUtil --info

Finally install CubeSDR

This is the actual software package itself

cd ~/src/CubicSDR
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DwxWidgets_CONFIG_EXECUTABLE=~/Develop/wxWidgets-staticlib/bin/wx-config
make
sudo make instal

At this point you can run CubeSDR to view radio waves

Other Packages

Here are some reliatively easy to install packages

Download

cd src
git clone https://github.com/merbanan/rtl_433.git
git clone git://github.com/tedsluis/dump1090.git
git clone https://github.com/gat3way/rtl_acars_ng.git

Install

Install the rtl_433 package to view transmissions from 433Mhz devices around you

cd ~/src/rtl_433
mkdir build
cd build
cmake3 .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
make
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

Install dump1090 to view airplanes around you

cd ~/src/dump1090/
make
sudo cp dump1090 /usr/local/bin/

More information planes transmit

cd ~/src/rtl_acars_ng
make
sudo cp rtl_acars_ng /usr/local/bin/

Sample run

rtl_acars_ng -f 131550000