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.