Howto get Ubiquiti AirView running under Ubuntu 12.04

September 9, 2012

Ubiquiti AirView is a spectrum analyzer for the 2.4GHz band, which is sadly End-of-Life, but you can still get it from various online stores. Why would you get such a product? Because it is much much cheaper (around 70 Eur) than the other spectrum analyzers I found on the net and its software runs under Linux. This short howto shows you, how to get it running under Ubuntu 12.04.

First you need to install openjdk-7-jre with following command:

apt-get install openjdk-7-jre

Than you need check which java version is the default one:

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_24"

As in this case it is the wrong one … change it following command:

$ sudo update-alternatives --config java
There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).

Selection    Path                                           Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
* 0            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-i386/jre/bin/java   1061      auto mode
1            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-i386/jre/bin/java   1061      manual mode
2            /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/bin/java   1051      manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 2
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-7-openjdk-i386/jre/bin/java to provide /usr/bin/java (java) in manual mode.

As you see I’ve have chosen 2 and the check confirms it:

$ java -version
java version "1.7.0_03"
OpenJDK Runtime Environment (IcedTea7 2.1.1pre) (7~u3-2.1.1~pre1-1ubuntu3)
OpenJDK Server VM (build 22.0-b10, mixed mode)

Now you just need to to download, extract and run the software (don’t forget to insert the AirView into the USB port ;-):

wget http://www.ubnt.com/airview/download/AirView-Spectrum-Analyzer-v1.0.12.tar.gz
tar xzf AirView-Spectrum-Analyzer-v1.0.12.tar.gz
cd AirView-Spectrum-Analyzer-v1.0.12/
./airview.sh

Following screenshot shows it running on my system. I’ve  switched to “waterfall view” in the settings. Click onto it to see the unscaled version:

2 Comments »

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  1. 🙂

    Thanks man, that worked

    Comment by Roderick — December 28, 2012 #

  2. When I plug in my USB, before (or after) I run this script, it can’t seem to find it. Any suggestions?

    Comment by Drew — June 11, 2013 #

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