Installation

Supported operating system

ld-decode and the various included tools are designed for (and tested on) Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (support for 18.04 was dropped in November 2020). It may be possible to compile and run ld-decode in other environments however this is not supported nor tested by the project. For first-time users it is highly recommended that you install the recommended environment; if a bare-metal installation is not available, you can use tools such as virtualbox to install ld-decode in a virtual machine or container.

System requirements

ld-decode performs complex mathematics on huge datasets and therefore requires a fairly high-end PC for any serious use. A Haswell (or newer) i9/i7 or Ryzen with 16Gb of RAM and 8 Tbytes of hard-drive is recommended, however the minimum requirements are a Sandy Bridge i5 with 8Gb RAM and 512Gb of hard-drive.

Pre-installation

Before attempting to install ld-decode ensure you have a sane (preferably fresh) Ubuntu installation that is up to date. Use the following commands to ensure you have the latest software packages:

sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade

Installation

To install ld-decode and the associated tools enter the following commands into a command terminal in the order shown (you will need root access to the machine via the sudo command to perform the installation):

sudo apt install clang libopencv-dev libfann-dev python3-numpy python3-scipy python3-matplotlib git qt5-default libqwt-qt5-dev libfftw3-dev python3-tk python3-pandas python3-numba libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev ffmpeg openssl pv python3-distutils

mkdir ~/github

cd ~/github

git clone https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

cd ~/github/ld-decode

make -j8 all (where 8 is however many CPUs you want to use)

sudo make install

The make all stage will take the most time - you can speed it up considerably by telling it to use multiple CPUs, e.g. make -j8 all to use 8 CPUs.

Post-installation

For basic use instructions please see the basic usage instructions on this wiki. For more advanced topics please browse the wiki contents using the navigation pane on the right of this page.

Development branches

The installation above will install the 'master' github branch. This is the tested, (hopefully) stable current version of ld-decode. Development work on the software happens on 'development' branches that are typically named revX (where X is the release version being worked towards). The development branch contains software that is being actively worked on so may not work at all or get broken at any point.

If you wish to use the development branch (and you know what it is for and how to handle active software development), you can clone the development branch with a command such as the following:

git clone --single-branch --branch great-fix-dev https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode

This example command will clone the great-fix-dev branch onto your local machine.