Currently I use OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 for my radio tweaking and general purpose needs. OpenSUSE Leap is a fantastic distro and I've found it to be a good middle ground between something thats either rolling (or constantly pulling in loads of updates every other day), and something considered traditionally 'stable' and therefore stale! I rarely have any problems with the system; it's polished, solid and just gets out of the way. Out of the box OpenSUSE doesn't have huge amount of radio related software but with the addition of a couple of extra repo's and a couple of tweaks, it can be very quickly turned in to a great system for amateur radio use.
This page doesn't document exactly how things are setup but should hopefully be useful for folks looking for hints how to get a machine setup using the distroHamradio- As detailed in the wiki page here. The software that I use from here includes wsjtx (for FT8 and WSRP mainly), fldigi (for RTTY and PSK), direwolf (software packet radio modem), Xastir (for APRS) and qsstv (for decoding slow scan TV images)
Hardware:SDR- More info here. The software from here includes QTRadio (along with a couple of RTL dongles for wideband SDR reception) & Gpredict (for monitoring satellite passes).
To allow my standard user account to control my rigs PTT feature via the USB serial interface that's connected to it (comes up as a /dev/ttyUSBx port), it's been added to the "dialout" group. This also allows access to Arduino/ESP32 modules when they're connected to the computer too. The user account has also been added to the "rtlsdr" group so that it can get at the SDR hardware. This group is added when the rtl packages are installed
Last updated: 2021-01-01