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all. I'm a newly licensed ham radio operator without a radio. I bought the Adafruit SDR thinking it might be a cheap entry point. When it arrived, I tried to get the "FreqShow" gadget up, only to realize it would be a major project (for me) to try to make it work on the existing HDMI-connected display instead of the nifty small lcd display it was written for. so, it was off to find a nice "radio" GUI that would run with the gear on hand. Finally found "Gqrx", which sounded great but only runs on a Linux box - nuts - another brick wall! But wait! What's this about the new port of Ubuntu Linux that runs on the RPi 2B?

which brings us to my question: does anybody KNOW if this would all work? Being 70+, I'm getting a little weary of the "yet another chase through the maze" ritual - Raspbian works well enough, and, after a week or so of hacking my way through the SDR-on-the-Raspberry-Pi maze, it DOES run rtl_fm just fine...

Thanks large, Clancy KC3HIJ

user3612779
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only runs on a Linux box -- nuts

"Nuts" if you were planning on running Windows IoT, which would likely involve even more "chase through the maze". Probably 95%+ of Pis are GNU/Linux based; Raspbian is just a tweaked version of Debian. I mention this in case there is any confusion.

So, you don't need to use Ubuntu, and to make life simpler you may want to stick with the most commonplace OS (Raspbian). There are a variety of Ubuntu variants for the Pi 2, by the way (and possibly more since that list was updated). I would stay away from "Snappy Core" as it is somewhat specialized and uses a read-only root filesystem.

In any case, regardless of what distro you choose, I don't see why this won't work. Gqrz-SDR is Qt based and open source; it probably isn't that hard to compile if you want, but there's a binary package (v. 2.3.1), gqrx-sdr in the Raspbian repos and very likely most other distros as well.

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goldilocks
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    Net, what goldilocks is saying is: do a sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install gqrx-sdr on your Raspberry Pi (assuming you're running Raspbian), and gqrx is up and running. – Phil B. Sep 02 '16 at 20:17
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    @PhilB. Just a touch of maze. A sprinkling. Wafer thin. Down the hall, second red door on the left. – goldilocks Sep 02 '16 at 20:23
  • Phil, Your step 1 went fine, nothing needed done. Step 2 looked optimistic as it prepared to go get Gqrx, but apparently couldn't find it - see below. I'm going to give up and write my own. Now, if I could just figure out how to edit, compile, and link my own radio code on this puppy... result of Phil's step 2: pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install Gqrx-sdr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package Gqrx-sdr pi@raspberrypi ~ $     – user3612779 Sep 03 '16 at 16:56
  • Phil, Your step 1 went fine, nothing needed done. Step 2 looked optimistic as it prepared to go get Gqrx, but apparently couldn't find it - see below. I'm going to give up and write my own. Now, if I could just figure out how to edit, compile, and link my own radio code on this puppy... result of @Phil's step 2: pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get install Gqrx-sdr Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package Gqrx-sdr pi@raspberrypi ~ $ Oh, well, it's just a boxful of transistors...     – user3612779 Sep 03 '16 at 17:10
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    Small G. apt install gqrx-sdr – goldilocks Sep 03 '16 at 21:36