The Real Roboticist (lesson 2): Installing ROS on your Ubuntu LTS 14.04

Introduction

Here you’ll be installing ROS indigo (which is just a distribution of ROS, like Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux). I recommend ROS indigo because it is the most stable version to date and will have support until 2019. It also supports the latest version of Ubuntu.

Setup your sources.list

Setup your computer to accept software from packages.ros.org. ROS Indigo ONLY supports Saucy (13.10) and Trusty (14.04) for Debian packages.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu
(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

 Set up your keys

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key 0xB01FA116

You can try the following command by adding :80 if you have gpg: keyserver timed out error

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 –recv-key 0xB01FA116

Installation

First, make sure your Debian package index is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update

Now for the magic line

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full

If doing all that returns an error, try copy pasting this entire section into your terminal.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full

Initialize rosedp

The ROS system may depend on software packages that are not loaded initially. These software packages external to ROS are provided by the operating system. The ROS environment command rosdep is used to download and install these external packages. It’s kind of like the way you use sudo apt-get install, except since ROS is a different operating system, you use this.
Type the following command:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Setup ROS environment

source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash

Sometimes it’s easier if the variables are automatically added to your sessions every time a new shell is launched. Do so by typing the following command into terminal.

echo "source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Rosinstall

This is the kind of like the terminal, except for ROS packages.

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

For more help and troubleshooting, visit the official ROS website and for problems with setting up the environment, try http://wiki.ros.org/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment.

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