PicoScope Linux

A number of years ago I attended the ARRL Teacher's Institute. In addition to some amazing instruction, we received some amazing gear to take home and play with. One of these was a PicoScope 2204A digital oscilloscope. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that they support the Debian family of Linux distros. The readme.txt on the installation DVD pointed me in the right direction where I found the steps to get it up and running on my Ubuntu 22.04 system:

1. Edit /etc/apt/sources.list (as root via sudo) and add following line:

deb http://labs.picotech.com/debian picoscope main

2. Import public key

wget -O - http://labs.picotech.com/debian/dists/picoscope/Release.gpg.key | sudo apt-key add - 

This threw a warning, but seems to have worked:

Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8)).
OK

More on this later...

3. Update apt cache

sudo apt update

4. Install driver for your 'scope (libps2000[a] | libps3000[a] | libps5000[a] | libps6000)

sudo apt install libps2000a

5. Install the picoscope software

sudo apt install picoscope

man apt-key generated shows all the deprecation warnings. I've included the relevant excerpts here.

If your existing use of apt-key add looks like this:

wget -qO- https://myrepo.example/myrepo.asc | sudo apt-key add -

Then you can directly replace this with (though note the recommendation below):

wget -qO- https://myrepo.example/myrepo.asc | sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/myrepo.asc

Make sure to use the "asc" extension for ASCII armored keys and the "gpg" extension for the binary OpenPGP format (also known as "GPG key public ring"). The binary OpenPGP format works for all apt versions, while the ASCII armored format works for apt version >= 1.4.

Recommended: Instead of placing keys into the /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d directory, you can place them anywhere on your filesystem by using the Signed-By option in your sources.list and pointing to the filename of the key. See sources.list(5) for details. Since APT 2.4, /etc/apt/keyrings is provided as the recommended location for keys not managed by packages. When using a deb822-style sources.list, and with apt version >= 2.4, the Signed-By option can also be used to include the full ASCII armored keyring directly in the sources.list without an additional file.