Building on Linux is quick and easy, on Ubuntu even more so! These instructions are known-working on Ubuntu karmic, lucid and oneiric and have been reported to work verbatim on other versions and even Debian squeeze too. The commands aptitude and apt-get are typical of Ubuntu and Debian distributions. To build on others, you may need to find out what the packages are called on those systems.

You may want to make a note of the packages that you install below, incase you want to clean up and purge them later.

Open a terminal (Applications→Accessories) and then start by installing all of the build and runtime dependencies of vanilla fldigi.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get build-dep fldigi

dl-fldigi also requires a few other libraries. To build from scratch you will also need the git and autoconf utilities.

$ sudo apt-get install git-core libcurl4-openssl-dev libjpeg62-dev autoconf

Note that this will provide the latest version from github rather than the current released version. This could have some new features and bug fixes as well as the potential for new bugs. You will also get a warning message saying there's a new version available which can be ignored (if you want the current stable version you can run git checkout DL3.1 after the git clone command.

$ git clone git://github.com/ukhas/dl-fldigi.git
$ cd dl-fldigi
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update
$ autoreconf -vfi
$ ./configure --disable-flarq --enable-optimizations=native
$ make

You will now have a copy of dl-fldigi at src/fldigi. dl-fldigi will run just fine without make installing, if you prefer.

To get started, run:

$ ./src/dl-fldigi

Or to use the new “HAB” slim interface (advised)

$ ./src/dl-fldigi --hab

To install the released version on ubuntu 14.04 as opposed to the bleeding edge version some additional steps are required. (Similar fixes to src/Makefile.am are needed for later versions of Fedora as well)

Install main dependencies (Same as listed above)

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get build-dep fldigi
$ sudo apt-get install git-core libcurl4-openssl-dev libjpeg62-dev autoconf

Install additional dependency

$ sudo apt-get install libxmlrpc-c++8-dev

$ git clone git://github.com/ukhas/dl-fldigi.git
$ cd dl-fldigi
$ git checkout DL3.1
$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

you now need to edit the file src/Makefile.am and comment out the line that starts “TESTS =” (line 229) by adding a # to the start of the line. You can now continue with the build process as before.

$ autoreconf -vfi
$ ./configure --disable-flarq
$ make

You will now have a copy of dl-fldigi at src/fldigi. dl-fldigi will run just fine without make installing, if you prefer.

To get started, run:

$ ./src/dl-fldigi

Or to use the new “HAB” slim interface (advised)

$ ./src/dl-fldigi --hab

• Running “./src/dl-fldigi” starts dl-fldigi in 'offline' mode. It won't upload or phone home, won't download payload data and will use the cache if any. You have to use the config tab or the dl menu to go online.

• Starting with –hab gets you a customised “HAB UI” and is automatically “online” - but not configured to receive. See the payload drop down box and “Autoconfigure” button

• The DL3.1 version crashes when using the THOR Op Mode and receiving just noise. The bleeding edge version does not have this issue (but is said to be problematic in the RTTY Op Mode)

• The Version 2.0 section on the dl-fldigi page has more usage information.
• The source code provided on git may be ahead of the released version. If this is the case you will see a warning stating there's a newer version available, This can be ignored if you are happy running the latest code base.