CHIRP

h1. Running CHIRP Under Linux

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CHIRP's preferred platform is Linux. By far the best way to get CHIRP running is to use one of the binary package repositories provided and maintained by volunteers. If you are running an obscure or old distribution, you may need to install it manually from the source tarball.

h2. Ubuntu package via PPA

This is super quick and easy if you're running a reasonably new version of Ubuntu. Simply run the following in a terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:dansmith/chirp-snapshots
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install chirp-daily

Look for CHIRP under your distribution's applications menu.

h2. Fedora package via the D-RATS RPM repository

This too is quite easy. First, we install the repository RPM and then CHIRP itself. From a terminal:

rpm -Uvfh http://d-rats.com/yum/f11/d-rats-repo-0.1.2-1.fc11.noarch.rpm
yum install chirp

Look for CHIRP under your distribution's applications menu.

h2. Manual installation from source

If you are here, you are probably running an old or obscure distribution, or you want to run from source for some other reason (such as testing a daily build). Before you start, make sure that the required python modules are installed on your system. Some suggestions on how to do this are:

• Ubuntu/Debian: @apt-get install python-gtk python-serial python-libxml2@
• Fedora/RedHat: @yum install pyserial pygtk2 libxml2-python@

Next, grab the source tarball from the Download page and save it somewhere like your home directory and then unpack it:

tar xzf chirp-0.1.12.tar.gz
cd chirp-0.1.12

From here, the easiest thing is to just launch CHIRP directly without installing it onto your system. Don't worry, this works just fine and CHIRP will be fully functional. Simply run the following:

./chirpw

Once you've tested that it runs on your system, you may want to install it permanently. To do this, run the setup routine by doing:

sudo python setup.py install

When finished, you should be able to run "chirpw" from anywhere on your system, and (with luck) you'll also have an item in your distribution's applications menu.

h2. serial port permissions

Note that you may need to adjust permissions on the /dev/tty(something) device, or add your users who want to use Chirp to the "dialout" group in order to let non-privileged users access the serial device.

This issue is often indicated by an "access denied" error when accessing serial port.

On ubuntu, for example, this is accomplished with:

sudo addgroup "$USERNAME" dialout

You will then need to log out and back in for it to take effect.