Install the latest version of FLDigi on Linux

How To's
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Before you read.

  • Just some things to know about this post. I will be including extra info that is not necessarily mandatory. The reason is to demonstrate some of my thought process and to possibly teach some tips and tricks along the way to newer users. If you like it or not let me know.
  • This post is best for intermediate + Linux users, but should have enough info to walk most people along.
  • The title says how to install on Linux, but I really mean any Debian type OS, like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian…
  • I will usually naively assume that you keep your computer up-to-date. Therefore, I won’t preface the install steps with sudo apt update or sudo apt upgrade. ie run those if you haven’t updated today.
    -If you’re not into the story the read the TL;DR.

What’s the big deal?

So you may be wondering why you would want to waste time on installing the latest versions from source instead of just installing the one from the repository. Well, let’s look at this:

  • At the time of writing this when I look up the latest version of FLDigi in the Ubuntu repo it is 4.0.1-1, which came out 03-28-2017.
    • As found by typing sudo apt update; sudo apt-cache show fldigi | grep Version.
  • The current version is 4.0.17, which came out 06-12-2018.
  • If you were to download the latest version for Windows or Mac right now you would actually get the latest vesrion.

Still Why does this matter?

Let’s look at the points. (Yes, I love bullet points.)

  • If you are teaching a class or giving a demo to someone this will help you make sure that you have the same UX (user experience - display and overall layout) as the other users.
  • Bug fixes. We all hate bugs so why settle.
  • Feature updates. The more features the better.
  • There are more reasons and if you care to list them add them to the comments.

So Let’s get started.

Installing Development Dependencies.

  • Let’s make sure we have the latest development tools so that way we can actually compile the source.
    • sudo apt install build-essential git

Installing FLDigi Dependencies.

So we could look up in the docs and find all of the many many dependencies, and then track down all of dependencies dependencies. So instead of going down the rabbit hole, lets do the next points.

  1. So first I tried running sudo apt build-deps fldigi (which will look for and install all of the packages source dependencies and install it), but then I got back E: You must put some 'source' URIs in your sources.list.
    That’s not helpful…
  2. So then I saw that their website suggests installing a third party repo to install fldigi from.
    • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kamalmostafa/fldigi
    • sudo apt-get update
    • And now sudo apt build-dep fldigi again.

There we go now it has a huge list of things to install. So we say yes and the go and get a cup of coffee while we wait.

Finally on to installing FLDigi…

  1. Now that all of the deps are installed, we need to go and get the latest source. We need the one that has the highest version number and ends in .tar.gz.
  2. So it is now downloaded and we need to unzip it. We are going to do this from the terminal, because we can.
    • cd ~/Downloads
    • tar -xzvf fldigi-4.0.17.tar.gz (change to match whatever version you have)
  3. Ok, so now we have downloaded and extracted it but we are going to pause here and make sure that we have the latest version of hamlib. Why? Because we want to have the latest radios available to us.

Installing HamLib

Look at my other guide Installing HamLib on Linux.

Back to installing FLDigi

Run the following:

  1. cd ~/Downloads/fldigi-4.0.17/
  2. ./configure
  3. make
  4. sudo make install

Updating

So now next time a new release comes out you can rinse and repeat the steps with the latest version, excluding the need to install the deps.

The End

Assuming nothing says failed on any of those steps, you should now be good to go.
Open up your Menu, App Viewer, or whatever you want to call it and you should see FLDigi. If you don’t you may need to restart your computer or log off and back in.

TL;DR

  1. Open up the terminal.
  2. sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kamalmostafa/fldigi
  3. sudo apt-get update
  4. sudo apt build-dep fldigi
  5. In the browser. Go and get the latest source.
  6. In the terminal.
  7. cd ~/Downloads
  8. tar -xzvf fldigi-4.0.17.tar.gz Change to match your version.
  9. Look at my other guide Installing HamLib on Linux.
  10. Once HamLib is installed cd ~/Downloads/fldigi-4.0.17 Change to match your version.
  11. ./configure
  12. make
  13. sudo make install
  14. Open fldigi form menu.
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Have linux mint no working any ideas for update thanks