Ubuntu ARM install of ROS Groovy
There are currently some experimental builds of ROS for Ubuntu Oneiric armel, Ubuntu Precise armel and armhf, and Ubuntu Quantal armhf. These builds do not include all packages, but they should save a considerable amount of time compared to doing a full source-based installation.
The Ubuntu armel build farm status is available here, the armhf farm is here, and the build farm is maintained by Austin Hendrix.
Contents
Installation
Configure your Ubuntu repositories
Configure your Ubuntu repositories to allow "restricted," "universe," and "multiverse." You can follow the Ubuntu guide for instructions on doing this.
Setup your sources.list
Setup your computer to accept software from the ARM mirror on packages.ros.org.
Due to limited resources, there are only active builds for Oneiric armel and Precise armhf, since these appear to be the most popular Ubuntu distributions in use on ARM.
Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise armhf)
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.namniart.com/repos/ros precise main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal armhf)
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.namniart.com/repos/ros quantal main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
Set up your keys
wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add - wget http://packages.namniart.com/repos/namniart.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
Installation
First, make sure your Debian package index is up-to-date:
sudo apt-get update
There are many different libraries and tools in ROS. Most of the default configurations do not yet compile fully on ARM. You can also install ROS packages individually.
ROS-Base: (Bare Bones) ROS package, build, and communication libraries. No GUI tools.
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-ros-base
Individual Package: You can install a specific ROS package (replace underscores with dashes of the package name):
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-PACKAGE
e.g.sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-ros
To find available packages, use:
apt-cache search ros-groovy
Initialize rosdep
Before you can use ROS, you will need to install and initialize rosdep. rosdep enables you to easily install system dependencies for source you want to compile and is required to run some core components in ROS.
sudo apt-get install python-rosdep sudo rosdep init rosdep update
Environment setup
It's convenient if the ROS environment variables are automatically added to your bash session every time a new shell is launched:
echo "source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc source ~/.bashrc
If you have more than one ROS distribution installed, ~/.bashrc must only source the setup.bash for the version you are currently using.
If you just want to change the environment of your current shell, you can type:
source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash
Getting rosinstall
rosinstall is a frequently used command-line tool in ROS that is distributed separately. It enables you to easily download many source trees for ROS packages with one command.
To install this tool on Ubuntu, run:
sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall
