As you likely already know, the Echolink team do not provide a native linux solution. The best they offer is run it under wine. And if you run a modern linux distro that is up to date, and have tried to install echolink under wine, you will know that it crashes before the unpacker has done its job. But, fear not there is a solution.
sm0svx has written a native linux Echolink client and server and it can be found at https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink . Now this is not going to be an easy sudo apt-get install, you will have to compile from source and it has a string of dependencies that also need to be accounted for before you do anything.
I run Linux Mint, but these instructions should work for any debian/ubuntu based distro. For others replace apt-get with your package manager commands. Yum on redhat/centos for example.
Step 1: Install all the dependencies:
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sudo apt-get install g++ libsigc++-2.0-dev libgsm1-dev libpopt-dev tcl-dev libgcrypt11-dev libspeex-dev libasound2-dev make alsa-utils libqt4-dev |
Step 2: Download the source files:
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wget https://github.com/sm0svx/svxlink/archive/14.08.2.zip |
Step 3: Unpack source and issue the following commands:
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cd yourpath/svxlink-14.08.2/src mkdir build cd build cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc \-DLOCAL_STATE_DIR=/var .. make |
Sit back and wait while the software compiles:
Step 4: Run the Software:
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cd bin ./qtel |
And that is it really, you can make install if you want, but i generally run software like this locally from my home directory. QTEL is the echolink client software and svxlink is the server client. Hope this helps,
Enjoy.
Thank you it 100% worked compiled OK and works OK may I copy your instructions to post onto YouTube my channel with reference to your site and such with thanks this is my first attempt to compile software for Linux mint 17.2xfce 32 bit and very happy regards gw7lop
Glad you found the information useful Steve. By all means make a youtube of how its done, sharing the information will make it easier for others to get echolink on their linux boxes.
Hi Robert
Looks like I have a lot more to learn before I become proficient with Linux.
I have only just recently switched from Windblows to Linux.
Here is where I got confused. cd yourpath/svxlink-14.08.2/src
I have replaced “yourpath” with /home/bob/echolink and I have created these directories /echolink/svxlink-14.08.2/src: in /home/bob/
Q what path? where I want the files to end up or where I just downloaded the zip file to?
Q do I need to create a directory first where I want “echolink” to live?
Wait, I fixed it myself.
I moved the 14.08.2.zip into the /home/bob/echolink directory which I just created and extracted it from there. Now the rest of your instructions work and Echolink works.
Thanks Robert for providing your instructions for us Linux impaired hams. I left this up just in case someone else made the same mistake in trying to be too tidy in their home directory.
73 Bob vk2byf
Hi Bob, Linux can be a little different if you have not done much command line before. Typically, as long as you are in the right directory, you can issue the commands prefixed with ./ DOT SLASH is shorthand for the full path of where you are currently are.
Glad you worked it out and have echolink now working on your Linux Box. 73’s
Hi bob,
i get this: CMake Error: The source directory “/home/mike/svxlink-14.08.2/src/build/…” does not exist.
then when imremove the three dots i get this: CMake Error: The source directory “/home/mike/svxlink-14.08.2/src/build” does not appear to contain CMakeLists.txt.
the build directory is indeed empty
/home/mike/svxlink-14.08.2/src/build/
my full path
If you are in the directory /home/mike/svxlink-14.08.2/src/build/ you should then be able to run cmake, what the error is telling you is that you are in the wrong directory.
cd /home/mike/svxlink-14.08.2/src
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc \-DLOCAL_STATE_DIR=/var ..
make
Specifically, issue those commands in that order and it should work. Good luck Mike.
Will this setup work with the “sysop” mode, as opposed to someone just running an Echolink terminal in order to access the Echolink nodes? I tried the sysop setup in WINE. and it would not function, but as a simple client it worked fine. Thank you for your insight and technical prowess!
There are 2 parts to this program Qtel is the client software to make echolink calls, and svxlink which does the server side parts, (Sysop Mode) I have not played with this part of the software, but i believe it should work for setting up an echolink server node.
Hi Robert-
I used your Echolink on Linux procedures (above). They worked great. The problem I have is when I start the program, after setting, I can not connect to anyone. It seems to be a NAT firewall problem. I looked all over the internet for a solution, but have come up short. The procedure I did on WIN 10 for the Router which worked great, did not work on LimuxMint 17.3.
Any recommendations?
73 kb7ypf/Dick
Hmm, most likely issue will be with port forwarding, as long as the ports are forwarded to the machine and are open on the router, it should work fine. Just to ensure they are forwarded to the IP address of the linux box, if you are issuing dynamic addresses to your home network, then linux and windows might have different IP addresses. Using static IP addresses on home networks generally makes life easier for these kinds of things.
Keep me posted on how you get on with it, just in case someone has the same issue and stumbles onto this site looking for the same help.
Sorry i cannot be more help,
Rob.
Hi Robert-
Thank you for your response. I did find a solution for running EchoLink in Linux, however, I was not able to fix the current (above) problem of not being able to connect to anyone.
I went to the EchoLink web page and download the latest EchoLink Windows software to my Linux Mint 17.3 Download folder. Having already installed Wine on my computer, it was just a matter of opening the program with the Wine Program Windows Loader and installing it under the Wine directories (this happens automatically).
After installation I had a nice EchoLink Icon on my desktop. After clicking on the EchoLink Icon, the program came up and I was able to connect to others without issue.
In case you are wondering, I did not have to make any adjustments to my Router. The way I set the Router up for Win 10 worked with Linux Mint.
Hope this can help someone else having issues like I did.
73 kb7ypf
I have not used the software in a while, seems the last few upgrades of Mint have left the program broken, while mine runs and connects, there is no audio and also when attempting to recompile the software it complains about QT5 locations because QT4 is no longer installed. Looks like i will have to play about with this sometime soon and see if i can get it working again on the current version of Mint.
Cheers,
Rob.
Thank you. Installation 100% error free!
I would not have thought, but it worked perfect on the first strike.
thank you and 73 from Germany DL8CY
Good to hear it worked well for you to. You must be using an older version of Linux the newest versions have broken things in some of the libraries.
Does anyone have any guidance on how to configure svxlink to talk to the USB radio interface?
I have a windows XP box running echolink server with a rigblaster nomic for the radio interface. Im trying to eliminate windows and this XP box is my last major hurdle.
Any links, discussions threads, spells or incantations would be greatly appreciated.
Sorry, i have no idea myself.
Our club wants to add EchoLink to its repeater. One of these days I will learn NOT to volunteer for projects. The PC that I have to make this work is an aging Lenovo with 512MB of RAM & it had Windows Vista on it when it was given to me.
I replaced Windows Vista with Ubuntu Server (running in command line mode to reduce the load on the computer), installed SvxLink on it & have a couple of problems.
The club wants to EchoLink limit access to those who have paid repeater dues & there is a rather long existing USB cable from the room where the PC is located to the room where the repeater cabinet is located (from what I have been told getting approvals to replace the cable are not possible plus there are issues with the repeater itself when making that change.) In addition to limiting access I have the problem of how to configure the USB side of things.
I have been using Linux for a while but do not consider myself an expert. I was able to get the Windows version of EchoLink running using Wine but that actually leaves me with a lot more problems than I current have
This is probably way above my pay grade sorry.
Good Afternoon,
I am using Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon 64bit
I just need to check if the results I have are correct.
I downloaded svxlink-master.zip from http://www.svxlink.org
I then un-zipped the svxlink-master.zip to home/rkb/svxlink
I then ran:
sudo apt-get install g++ libsigc++-2.0-dev libgsm1-dev libpopt-dev tcl-dev libgcrypt11-dev libspeex-dev libasound2-dev make alsa-utils libqt4-dev
cd svxlink/src
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DSYSCONF_INSTALL_DIR=/etc \-LOCAL_STATE_DIR=/var ..
make
cd bin
./qtel
I then made a Desktop Link to svxlink/src/build/bin/qtel which appears to works fine, screenshot (https://www.bwf.com.au/svxlink-screen-shot.png)
In the bin directory I have devcal – qtel – remotetx – sigledetcal – svxlink the only ‘file that will run is qtel, a screen shot is linked above. Should this other files run in particular svxlink
Thanking you in anticipation of a reply
Cheers
Ron VK4JE
I think you have it all covered, qtel is the correct exe file to run. Good luck
I was able to compile it and run it on my Raspberry Pi 3. I had to install some extra things (like ‘cmake’) that weren’t on my machine. I haven’t proven it works yet as it’s getting late. I’ll play with it more tomorrow and see if I can get to work.
About the only issue I can think of, does the Pi have a sound card? But getting it to compile and the software to run should not be a problem.
Nicely done! I jumped through elaborate hoops from some other install instructions for an hour or more, stumbled across these and was up and running in fifteen minutes!
Glad you found it helpful.
Robert
I have had some experience successfully compiling things like ircddbgateway and dstarrepeater
Followed the instructions, and now seem to be lost.
The dependencies all loaded without issue.
The cmake and make commands appeared to work correctly.
When I look at the contents of /my-path/svxlink-14.08.2/src/build/bin I can see three files
qtel
remotetrx
siglevdetcal
svxlink
the qtel file appears to have permissions for execution.
if I issue the command qtel from a terminal window I get “Segmentation fault”.
If you have any idea as to why, would appreciate it.
If it is going Sigsev then the issue will likely be with one of the libraries. I stopped using it a long time ago because it became a nightmare to manage libraries and keep other parts of the system up to date. I am back on Windows now days because i need it for work applications that refuse to run under linux. Good luck and i see you got it running under wine, so thats awesome, you found a solution.
Well here is a very strange solution.
Linux mint 18.1 64 bit
Could not install echolink from the install exe.
Put the install.exe into a zip ran the install from the zip, and voila and it installed fine, and runs fine.
Had to make three source changes to get it to compile on ubuntu 18.04 using ” gcc (Ubuntu 7.4.0-1ubuntu1~18.04.1) 7.4.0″ — but it worked! Thanks!!
I’m new to Linux but have Mint 19.3 (Tricia) successfully up and running. I just found this page and tried the install. But it quit with errors. Please see below. What is wrong? Thanks.
They changed some things in GCC since i last used this. You have to make a couple of changes to the code to make it work. I do not run linux anymore and cannot compile it with a current version of GCC to see and make the changes. The easiest thing I could recommend is to install a much earlier version of GCC and compile with that.
Hello, Robert & Co., using Ubuntu 18.04 here, and i got as far as the cmake, and after it got to 6% i got this error. Stopped me cold, have no idea where to go from here. Thanks… 73 de wn1z Orrin
[ 6%] Building CXX object async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/AsyncExec.cpp.o
/home/tywin/svxlink-14.08.2/src/async/core/AsyncExec.cpp: In member function ‘bool Async::Exec::run()’:
/home/tywin/svxlink-14.08.2/src/async/core/AsyncExec.cpp:338:22: error: invalid conversion from ‘char’ to ‘char*’ [-fpermissive]
cmd[args.size()] = ‘\0’;
^~~~
/home/tywin/svxlink-14.08.2/src/async/core/AsyncExec.cpp: In static member function ‘static void Async::Exec::sigchldReceived()’:
/home/tywin/svxlink-14.08.2/src/async/core/AsyncExec.cpp:532:7: warning: ignoring return value of ‘ssize_t read(int, void*, size_t)’, declared with attribute warn_unused_result [-Wunused-result]
read(sigchld_pipe[0], buf, 1);
~~~~^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/build.make:398: recipe for target ‘async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/AsyncExec.cpp.o’ failed
make[2]: *** [async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/AsyncExec.cpp.o] Error 1
CMakeFiles/Makefile2:115: recipe for target ‘async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/all’ failed
make[1]: *** [async/core/CMakeFiles/asynccore.dir/all] Error 2
Makefile:129: recipe for target ‘all’ failed
make: *** [all] Error 2
Hi Orrin,
/home/tywin/svxlink-14.08.2/src/async/core/AsyncExec.cpp:338:22: error: invalid conversion from ‘char’ to ‘char*’ [-fpermissive]
What is in bold is the issue. Roughly there is a variable being used that is of type char and its being used in a function that only takes pointers to the variable. I dont have the code in front of me as I no longer use linux, but where I would start is change the variable from char to char* and compile again. Or downgrade GCC to a few years ago and it will compile in that. The problem is the GCC guys changed things and this code has never been updated.
Rob.