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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Great, you can accomplish the bare essentials with Linux.
Now how do I install a program called chirp for programming 2 way radios?
Searched for a week and gave up as each set of instructions lead down a broken, redundant dependency rabbit hole with no solution in sight, Flatpack this, snap that, no explanation or even a searchable clue that could begin me a solution.
In windows I just unzip the nightly build to a directory of my choice, run the executable and it works.
Sure... Not everyone knows or needs to know about these edge case applications, but point stands, it works in windows, and everyone encounters an edge case sooner or later.
I'm keen to ditch the Microsoft hole, and I have no issue with making an effort to learn, but I can't afford to or my life in hold for hours or days at a time in order to accomplish things that already work in seconds.
I think my simple issue here is... I'm not incompetent. I can comfortably navigate a fine system in a shell, can mount and unmount, can tar -xvzf a tarball, can do most things up to writing a shell script from scratch (could cobble something
yay -S chirp-nextworked with zero rabbit holes, andchirp-nextworked immediately.wine ./chirpwx.exe
I just installed chirp on my Linux Mint machine from the GUI package manager. It's packaged as a .deb file. Don't know what your issue is.
Neither do I. If the errors made sense or the tutorials were more current I suspect I'd have no issue.
Investigating further I think I do see your issue. You started out installing software the way you do on Windows: Going out to the vendor's website and downloading a .exe. I went straight to my distro's package manager and installed a .deb, which worked fine...even if I got a 4-year old version of the software.
I will notice that on chrip.danplanet.com, it does briefly mention the legacy version can be installed "On Linux, via flatpak" which doesn't seem to be true at least anymore; neither Mint's software manager nor flathub.org return any relevant hits for "chirp."
Let's see if I can get it installed on my Mint machine by simply copy-pasting the commands listed on this page.
One criticism I can level right now about this tutorial page: Step 1. Install Distro Packages branches, you're supposed to use the APT command if using Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Raspbian etc . or the DNF command if using Fedora and compatible (which would include Red Hat, Nobara etc. Instructions for Arch-based distros are not included, I suppose if you Arch btw you don't need them. It's probably in the AUR. Point is this is a branching path, but doesn't have a 1.1 or 1.2. Next up, under Install CHIRP (and Python dependencies) this also branches, but has a 2.1 and 2.2 notation. My distro, Mint 21.1, is based on Ubuntu 22.04, so I cound in the Ubuntu 22.10 and earlier section, so I'll run that command.
It returns an error, and on further examination, it's pretty clear as to why. PIP is Python's package manager, which can and usually does download packages from a central repository, but in this case the ./ in the command means its looking for a file in this directory. Just above this, in a place that doesn't look like a step in this process, it's telling us to download the latest .tar.gz from another page.
So I go to this page and download the chirp-20231223-py3-none-any.whl file, noticing that this is a different file name than the one listed in the tutorial command. Since I used Firefox to download this file, I know that it landed in my ~/Downloads folder. I cd ~/Downloads, then run the pip command, substituting the name of the file I just downloaded.
The next instruction is to run ~/.local/bin/chirp, so it apparently installed it in the .local/bin hidden directory. Running that command launched the program successfully. It prompted me if I wanted to create a desktop icon, which isn't exactly what this did. What it did was create a .desktop file, which added CHIRP to my application menu...which is what I wanted it to do anyway. But I could have done this manually because it told me what the command to launch the program was.
The documentation isn't 100% straightforward. The formatting of two different either/or branches are not formatted similarly, and the "download the file" part doesn't look like a step, it's mentioned in insufficient detail as part of the description of the next step. There isn't enough information in this tutorial alone to figure this out, you have to have looked around the site a bit and have some experience doing this to figure it out.
This is also a personal note, but I would prefer that end-user applications not be installed with PIP. If you're not going to publish to the native package formats like .deb or .rpm, I would prefer you published a Flatpak on Flathub, or if you're being really lazy an appimage.
I think I'm going to contact the webmaster here with these critiques, to hopefully make it more consistent and clearer.
My first attempt was apt-get install. I'm fairly comfortable with Linux as a server (basic lamp setup) though I make no claims if being an expert.
It's clearly not in the default repos for Raspian (at least not when I tried), and that could be half my issue, my hardware while popular is not x86 or x86-64.
Huh. I’ve used chirp under Linux before and I just installed it with my package manager. Maybe it wasn’t available on your distro? Then it can get a lot more tricky. The other problem with these things can be permissions… once you have chirp installed maybe you need to add your user to the dial out group in order to be able to use the serial port to flash the radios.
No software is guaranteed to run on all platforms: the developers choose to make it available or not.
I did some quick googling, and it seems fairly easy to install it:
Use Ubuntu (if you're not familiar with, and don't want to be familiar with terminal basics), and install chirp from the Ubuntu App store. Snap is just a name of their package format, and their app store links to snap craft.
If you're not using Ubuntu, that's your choice, you'll either have to install snap, then do the same, but it's more work. Or play with the terminal just a bit to follow their instructions.
Details
If you're on Ubuntu or have snap installed - it's a one click operation to install chirp: https://snapcraft.io/chirp-snap
If you're on another distribution by choice: https://chirp.danplanet.com/projects/chirp/wiki/ChirpOnLinux
this page has a 3 step install for mainstream Linux distributions:
I'm no bash wizard, but I grew up with computers through the 80's and am comfortable with using a cli, doesn't bother me at all.
My OP got messed up with the Lemmy app I'm using and thus a large chunk went missing.
I'm actually using Raspian on a raspberry pi, and I don't think there is a binary for armhf available through the more typical means.
For everything else I just apt-get install xxx.
I'll revisit later.
I appreciate the effort in your post.
Given how Python-centric the manual install process is, I don't think CHIRP is distributed as a compiled binary, I think it's a Python application.
Supposing that you're asking in good faith, the answer appears to be to make a Lemmy post. There is a fair overlap with the HAM and *nix communities, especially the PubNixes. Chirp is fairly well-known so, package manager is likely the way to go.
Don't know why I could not see this repply until today. It's been ascertained that chirp is not in the repo for Raspian Linux, so indeed that option never worked.
My home instance has been having federation issues, unfortunately.