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:

Solution for “perl: warning: Setting locale failed”

September 6, 2012

Sometimes I come across Debian or Ubuntu Systems which report following error e.g. during installing new packages:

perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_PAPER = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_ADDRESS = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_MONETARY = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_NUMERIC = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_TELEPHONE = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_TIME = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LC_NAME = "de_AT.UTF-8",
LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory


In this special case it is complaining about de_AT.UTF-8, as the system is setup with German / Austria. To solve this you need to do following:

# locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8 de_AT.UTF-8
Generating locales...
de_AT.UTF-8... done
en_US.ISO-8859-1... done
en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.


Important: Replace de_AT.UTF-8 with the language it is complaining about. If you just copy’n’past it will not work, if you’re not from Austria. 😉

After this call:

# dpkg-reconfigure locales
Generating locales...
de_AT.UTF-8... up-to-date
en_US.ISO-8859-1... up-to-date
en_US.UTF-8... up-to-date
Generation complete.


and it should work again.