Nearly three years ago now, I retired the cheap HP 2000 laptop I was using in the shack with a refurbished HP Elite desktop computer. It has proven to be a very good buy, easily powering the SmartSDR software that runs my Flex 6400 and all the other software that I’ve thrown at it.
I still have the laptop. We used it for logging at Field Day a couple of years ago, but aside from that rather light duty, it’s just been taking up space. Last December, I had tried to install Linux on this laptop, but when I wasn’t successful right off the bat, I put the box back on the shelf, where it languished until about a month ago.
That’s when my friends over at the Linux in the Ham Shack podcast ran Episode #434: Linux Install Media Deep Dive. They made it sound relatively easy, so I decided to give it another try.
The first thing that you have to decide—after you’ve decided to install Linux, of course—is which distribution to install. I did a search for “best linux for an old laptop,” or something similar, and found the web page, Best Linux Distributions for An Old Laptop in 2021. Based upon what I read there, I decided to give Bodhi Linux a try.
Following NE4RD’s instructions, I first downloaded Rufus, a proram that allows you to create bootable USB drives from .iso files. Then, I downloaded the .iso file for Bodhi Linux and created the bootable USB drive. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the laptop didn’t boot from the USB drive. When I tried to boot from the USB drive, the laptop just went crazy. Thinking that it might be the BIOS settings, I played around with them, but to no avail. I think this is what tripped me up last December.
Poking around, I found a way to do it, however. What I had to do was to get into the BIOS without the USB drive being plugged in, then at the appropriate step plug it in, then specify the EFI file to boot from. When I did that it, worked!
I played around with Bodhi Linux for a a couple of days. I tried installing SDR++ because it was touted to be “bloat free,” but unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to work. I did install qgrx, and that worked just fine with my RTL-SDR dongle. In the end, though, I decided that Bodhi Linux was a little too “new agey” for me, and looked for another Linux distribution to install.
My second choice was Lubuntu. Lubuntu was touted as being “fast and lightweight,” so I thought I’d give it a go. Armed with my experience in installing Bodhi Linux, the Lubuntu install was easy. Again, I had no luck installing SDR++, but gqrx installed easily, and I quickly had it up and running.
A couple of days ago, however, I read about DragonOS Focal, which is an Ubuntu Linux image that comes preinstalled with multiple SDR software packages. According to the SourceForge page,
DragonOS Focal is an out-of-the-box Lubuntu 20.04 based x86_64 operating system for anyone interested in software defined radios. [Dragon OS Focal includes] the bigger named packages and drivers for SDRs, such as the HackRF One, RTL-SDR, and LimeSDR.
- srsLTE
- Yate/YateBTS
- Osmo-NITB
- Universal Radio Hacker
- GNU Radio
- Aircrack-ng
- GQRX
- Kalibrate-hackrf
- wireshare
- gr-gsm
- rtl-sdr
- HackRF
- IMSI-catcher
- Zenmap
- inspectrum
- qspectrumanalyzer
- LTE-Cell-Scanner
- CubicSDR
- Limesuite
- ShinySDR
- SDRAngel
- SDRTrunk
- Kismet
- BladeRF
- …and more.
That looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
I expected the install to go pretty much the same as the Lubuntu install, but that was not to be. I downloaded the .iso file and created the bootable USB drive with Rufus, but for some reason, I couldn’t get that to boot.
Somehow, I got the idea to create the bootable USB drive on the Lubuntu system using Balena Etcher. So, I downloaded the program and the .iso file to the Lubuntu machine and created the bootable drive. This time, it worked like a charm!
Dragon OS has just finished installing itself, and I’m rebooting now. I’ll report in future posts on how well the SDR programs run on this old laptop.
Dave New, N8SBE says
You beat me to the recommendation for Balena Etcher. I’ve had luck with using that to create Raspberry PI images and images for my 3D printer (which is now defunct for other reasons).
You are also discovering the wide world of Linux distributions. There are likely thousands of them, with widely varying levels of installation difficulty and support (or mostly lack thereof).
If you haven’t discovered this yet, the open source community is full of ‘those that help themselves, get some help (maybe)’. Even if you manage to install something like Dragon OS Focal, it will take a lot of your time to keep up with the package updates, which you will likely either have to install manually, or else just ‘pull the plug’ and re-load the system from scratch from an updated .iso every time.
I ran into this with using Ubuntu to run GNU Radio. The Ubuntu distribution had a particular version of GNU Radio in its ‘store’, so if you wanted to run something more recent, you have to take over the maintenance on your system yourself. Good luck with that. You will find lots of dependency issues, etc. Eventually, I ended up re-loading everything from scratch from a more Ubuntu distribution. Then you will need to back up and restore all your working files. It never ends.
I used to use Linux full time at home back in the 90’s, but that was in the days that I ran SunOS full time at work, so it made sense to be up to speed on all things *nix.
After I ended up moving to a new job where all I did was run Windows all day long, every day, it became too much trouble to keep up with two rather different OSes, so I ended up putting my Linux computers away.
I’ve kind of gotten back into *nix, mainly due to messing around with Raspberry PI’s, and other embedded *nix systems.
But, as long as I’m still working full-time on Windows boxes, I’ll likely not be able to get back up to full speed on *nix systems any time soon.
Deepspeed says
Bodhi dev here. We are sorry to hear your experience with Bodhi wasn’t great out of the box, but we are a friendly community and always open to help new users with any issues.
If you would like to try again, feel free to stop by our forums or discord. The developers and team are always willing to help in any way we can.
Dan KB6NU says
I wouldn’t say that my experience with Bodhi Linux “wasn’t great,” but just that it turned out not to be the right distribution for me. I was able to get it to install on my HP laptop, and that in itself was a good thing. And, apparently, lots of folks are having problems installing the SDR application I mentioned, so I can’t blaim Bodhi Linux for that.
Deepspeed says
I appreciate the reply. Just so you know, we do have a software request section on our forums and we also have our own software repositories where we package, test, and host custom builds of apps which users request whenever possible to meet niche needs like this.
I don’t fault you for using another distro if it suits you better, but I do want you to know we’re absolutely willing to help you solve any problems you have while using Bodhi if we are able. Please reach out to us with any concerns like this if you decide to give Bodhi another try.
Steve Stroh N8GNJ says
Looking forward to further tales of Amateur Radio Linux!