RTL SDR not working on Debian

[ladecadence]

Running the app as an AppImage, and after installing the relevant packages from the Help menu (confirmed on command line that python3-soapysdr, soapysdr-module-rtlsdr, and rtl-sdr are installed), I always get the "Driver not installed" and "SoapySDR not installed" errors on the SDR Device Installation window.

If I run the AppImage from the terminal, I can see the following error:

2026-07-08 13:03:28,872 WARNING sdr: SoapySDR import failed: ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'SoapySDR'

Running the python interpreter from the command line, I can import SoapySDR module without problems:

% python
Python 3.14.6 (main, Jun 10 2026, 18:54:31) [GCC 15.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import SoapySDR
>>> 

[JF9SOM]

Sorry for the slow reply — this has been sitting for about 6 days. Thanks for the very clear repro (confirming import SoapySDR works fine from a normal terminal Python was the key clue).

Found it: the AppImage's bundled Python (via PyInstaller) only sees its own bundled libraries by default — it never looked at your system's /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (or the equivalent site-packages on openSUSE/Fedora), where apt/zypper installs python3-soapysdr. So even with everything correctly installed system-wide, the AppImage had no way to find it. That's exactly what your log (ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'SoapySDR') showed.

Fixed by having the AppImage append those standard system package directories to its Python path at startup (only when actually running as the packaged AppImage — a normal source/dev run is unaffected since those paths are already on sys.path there). Bundled modules still take priority if there's ever a name collision; this only kicks in as a fallback for things (like SoapySDR) we don't bundle ourselves on Linux.

One caveat: this only works if the AppImage's Python version (currently 3.11) matches your system's python3-soapysdr build. Debian 12 and current Ubuntu both ship 3.11 by default, so this should be fine for you, but if you're on something with a different Python 3 version it could still fail with an ABI mismatch rather than a missing-module error.

This will ship in the next release, v0.2.15 (not tagged yet — bundling it with a couple of other fixes first). Could you give the new AppImage a try once it's out and let me know if SoapySDR shows up correctly? If not, the exact error message will help narrow it down further.

Thanks again for the detailed report!