Installing Lime Suite on Linux

Lime Suite is a cross-platform software stack for the configuration and use of a range of software defined radio (SDR) platforms, including the LimeSDR family. The following instructions are for users of Linux-based operating systems, and primarily focus on Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Installing via PPA

The easiest way to install Lime Suite is via Personal Package Archive (PPA), from the official Myriad-RF repository. This will ensure not only that you are installing the latest version, but that it is kept up-to-date via your operating system's package manager along with all your other software.

Note that we only package for Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) releases and generally for the current one, plus for some time after its release, the previous. For example, at the time of writing (17th Dec 2019), we package for Ubuntu 16.04.x and 18.04.x. This means that you need to be careful if running an older LTS release, since you may get Lime Suite packages from the PPA, but these may not have been updated in some time! Running old Lime Suite versions is discouraged and support will not be provided for these.

Open a terminal session, and type the following commands to add the PPA and refresh the list of available packages:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:myriadrf/drivers
sudo apt update

To install Lime Suite and its dependencies, type the following command:

sudo apt install limesuite liblimesuite-dev limesuite-udev limesuite-images soapysdr soapysdr-module-lms7

Once installed, Lime Suite and its dependencies will be automatically updated along with the rest of your software by your package manager. LimeSDR users will still need to manually update the firmware and gateware on their device when an update is made available, as described in LimeSDR Firmware Management.

Uninstalling via PPA

To remove Lime Suite and its dependencies when installed via PPA, type the following commands:

sudo apt remove limesuite liblimesuite-dev limesuite-udev limesuite-images soapysdr soapysdr-module-lms7
sudo add-apt-repository -y -r ppa:myriadrf/drivers
sudo apt update

To remove Lime Suite, its dependencies, and all configuration files, substitute "purge" for "remove" in the first command.

Building from Source

For other Linux-based operating systems, Lime Suite should be built from source. Note that this is only required when installing from the official PPA, as above, is not possible; under no circumstances should a system have both a PPA-installed and self-built copy of Lime Suite installed, or errors will almost certainly follow.

Installing Dependencies

Lime Suite depends on a range of additional software and libraries to operate. The majority of these can be installed using your distribution's package manager; in some cases, however, the versions of packages provided in official distribution repositories are too old to function with the latest Lime Suite release. For distributions with PPA support, the following command:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:myriadrf/drivers
sudo apt update

will add the official Myriad-RF PPA, which includes up-to-date versions of these dependencies, to your system. For distributions without PPA support, the "soapysdr" library should be built and installed from the latest source available on the project's GitHub repository before attempting to build Lime Suite.

To install the dependencies use the following command, excluding "libsoapysdr-dev" if you have compiled and installed "soapysdr" from source:

sudo apt install libsoapysdr-dev libi2c-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev git g++ cmake libsqlite3-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev freeglut3-dev

For distributions which do not use the apt package manager, install the listed packages with your distribution's own package manager (e.g. yum, pacman.)

Downloading the Source

To obtain the latest Lime Suite source files from the "Stable" branch, clone and checkout the repository using the following command:

git clone https://github.com/myriadrf/LimeSuite.git
cd LimeSuite
git checkout stable

If you have previously cloned the repository to install an older release, change to the LimeSuite directory and update the source with the following command instead:

git pull
cd builddir
make clean

Viewing the Configuration

To create a build directory for Lime Suite, type the following commands:

mkdir builddir
cd builddir

To configure the build process, and to see what components are enabled and disabled, use the following command:

cmake ../

Building and Installing Lime Suite

To begin the build process, type the following command:

make -j$(nproc)

The build process can take several minutes to complete, depending on the amount of memory and number of processor cores available on your system. When Lime Suite is built, install it by typing:

sudo make install
sudo ldconfig
cd ../udev-rules
sudo bash install.sh

The building and installation process is now complete. You can delete the LimeSuite directory to save space, if required, or keep it to make upgrading to the next release as simple as possible.

Next Steps

If you have installed Lime Suite to use a LimeSDR device, follow the instructions in Getting Started with the LimeSDR to install, configure, and test your hardware.