There are 2 primary guides for installing GNU Radio (GR) on MacOS X "Tiger" 10.4: Jon Jacky and Michael Dickens. The former is more of a guide, while the latter provides scripts for most of the work. GNU Radio can also be installed on MacOS X "Leopard" 10.5, using the same guides and almost the same scripts.

GR has been compiled and installed on MaxOS X 10.4 and 10.5 running any compatible version of XCode on all modern PPC-based Macs, and can be made to work with at least some Intel-based Macs. See the NOTE below. While it might be possible to use GNU Radio under MacOS X 10.3, getting the background libraries and applications installed would likely be difficult. The internal hardware on PPC-Macs was not designed for high throughput USB 2.0, and thus no PPC-Mac has been tested at 32 Mega-Bytes/second (MBps) using a USRP using the native USB hardware; close to 32 MBps can be achieved using PCI-based USB 2.0. The internal hardware on Intel-Macs is much better designed to handle USB 2.0, and hence even a 20" iMac can achieve 32 MBps.

The backgound libraries and applications which need to be installed include: GNU's libtool, gawk, guile, pkgconfig, zlib, automake, swig, cppunit, fftw-3-single, sdcc (2.4.0 - 2.7.0, see NOTE below), python2.4 (or newer), py-numpy, py-wxpython, doxygen, boost, and libusb - as well as anything which they require. subversion is also required to access the GNU Radio SVN repository, but not the numbered releases. wget is convenient for downloading tarballs, though curl is already installed.

These libraries and applications can be installed from source or binary, using Fink, MacPorts, and/or from source / scratch. The latter tends to be more up-to-date with respect to new releases, but also doesn't have a good GUI for dealing with modules - instead relying on a CLI. Both Fink and MacPorts offer thousands of ready-to-install libraries and applications.

NOTE: For Intel-Macs only, there is an issue involving some combination of XCode (2.3 - 3.0) and SDCC (2.4.0 - 2.7.0) which is currently unresolved, but results in the USRP hardware not being able to talk (via USB) with the USRP software. A work-around is to download a known working pre-compiled tarball of SDCC (2.4.0, compiled with the first release of XCode for Intel-Mac) and install that in place of the "usual" SDCC. This download is available from Michael Dickens' GR link above:

1. download sdcc-2.4.0-i386.tar.bz2

2. as your admin account

a. make sure SDCC is not already installed by DarwinPorts:

sudo port uninstall sdcc

b. from "/":

sudo tar jxf ....../sdcc-2.4.0-i386.tar.bz2

will install the pre-compiled binary and related files in /opt/local .

3. make sure /opt/local/bin is in your shell environment's path:

a. tcsh (add to ~/.tcshrc file): setenv PATH ${PATH}:/opt/local/bin

b. bash (add to ~/.bashrc file): export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

4. check to make sure the correct version of SDCC is being used (first rehash if in tcsh):

which sdcc

should return /opt/local/bin/sdcc. If not, then there is another SDCC installed somewhere which needs to be removed (or move /opt/local/bin to the head of PATH). Also, the command

sdcc -v

should return exactly:

SDCC : mcs51/gbz80/z80/avr/ds390/pic16/pic14/TININative/xa51/ds400/hc08 2.4.0 (Jul 12 2006) (UNIX)

Once this version of SDCC is installed on your Intel-Mac, the USRP module of GR should compile and execute properly.