Skywave Linux: Skywave Linux 4.2 Published

It certainly took long enough, didn't it? Well, Skywave Linux 4.2 is on the wires (fibers?), and it looks pretty solid, with those floating windows in i3wm worked out. There kernel is now 5.15.14-rt27-xanmod1 5.9.1 and several applications have been freshened. It is nice to have SDR++ now in the iso.

More of the drivers needed to run plugin SDR devices are now sourced from git repositories instead of the Ubuntu / Debian repos. It was a necessary change because the deb versions were either too old or had dependency conflicts with other software. It was a real mess, getting several drivers, libraries, and guis to play nicely together. There is still a mix of SoapySDR0.7 and SoapySDR0.8 in the system, but things worked well enough to proceed with the release of a new Skywave Linux iso.

The directory /usr/local/src is packed with fresh source code from cloned git repos. Bash scripts there are used to manage updates, where you can simply run a script and it will freshen the local source, compile the binaries, and install them. These are some of the changes:

• upgraded Xanmod kernel 5.15.14-rt27-xanmod1
• default screen resolution 1920 x 1080
• removed LightDM (now boot directly to the desktop)
• i3wm "master and stack" tiling window layout
• Configured fzf and fzf plugin for Neovim through Telescope and Treesitter
• Neovim more deeply integrated through Language Server Pprotocol
• fewer Neovim plugins for reduced latency
• LinHPSDR removed and replaced with SDR++ (SDRPlusPlus)
• Added SDR++ (SDRplusplus) working with devices through SoapySDR
• OBS Studio replaces Simplescreenrecorder
• Dump1090, the AIS monitor, and other utilities switched from Zenity to Rofi / Dmenu
• New RTLSDR bookmarks
• Revamped internet radio streamer
• Updated SSH tunneling (sshuttle); more stable behavior

It seems that a lot of people in the Eastern world are being cut off from news sources such as the BBC. Fortunately, if you have internet and Skywave Linux, you have access to the broadcasts you want. It is trivially easy to either get off-the-air signals from a WebSDR or KiwiSDR - or use a circumvention app to stream from their official urls.

It has become a challenge to keep up with the stream urls for that nice high quality broadcast streaming. WTF, broadcasters? How much control do need over your listeners? As if it is not enough to deal with blocked access on the receiving end, we must play games with platforms who intend to choose who listens? Game on, friends.

Skywave Linux v4.2 is a larger iso file, with more programming tools going along with the git source for those SDR drivers. With the increased size, it is more powerful Linux system. Over here, in my world, it has worked well for a number of monitoring, writing, and content creation tasks which involve radio in one way or another. It is a joy for writing Bash, Python, and HTML code. All while running my local SDR to sniff for signals on the bands.

Enjoy,

P.C. AB9IL / Skywave Linux

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