Ubuntu ARM install of ROS Indigo

There are currently builds of ROS for Ubuntu Trusty armhf. These builds include most but not all packages, and save a considerable amount of time compared to doing a full source-based installation.

Contents

Ubuntu ARM install of ROS Indigo

Supported/Tested Platforms

If this install works for your platform, please list it here:

Snapdragon Flight (Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 Processor), ROS install guide
Inforce IFC6410 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor)
eInfochips Eragon600 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor)
Nvidia Jetson TK1
Odroid C1, X, U2, U3, XU3 (Ubuntu 14.04) and XU4 (Ubuntu 14.04)
SolidRun CuBox-i Pro with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (tested; works)
BeagleBone Black (Ubuntu 14.04)
Parallella http://www.parallella.org (note default shell is not bash)
RadxaRock http://radxa.com/ (Ubuntu 14.04)
Pandaboard ES (Ubuntu 14.04)
Gumstix Overo Fire with Ubuntu Core 14.04 rootfs
Wandboard Quad (with Robert Nelson's kernel and Ubuntu 14.04) http://wandboard.org
Raspberry Pi 2 (with Ubuntu 14.04 2015-03-02 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi)
Google Nexus 5 (with Ubuntu Touch)
DJI Manifold https://developer.dji.com/manifold/ (Ubuntu 14.04)
eInfochips Eragon 410 (Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 Processor)
Dragonboard 410c (Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 Processor)
Orange Pi 2 and probably other Orange Pi's
Orbbec Persee

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.

Set your Locale

Boost and some of the ROS tools require that the system locale be set. You can set it with:

sudo update-locale LANG=C LANGUAGE=C LC_ALL=C LC_MESSAGES=POSIX

If there is a problem. Then try (other languages could be added):

$ export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
$ locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
$ dpkg-reconfigure locales

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 Trusty armhf (14.04), since this is the stable, long-term Ubuntu release and is the most-requested distribution in conjunction with ROS Indigo.

Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty armhf)

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty 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 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

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

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

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 - not all 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-indigo-ros-base
```
Desktop Install: ROS, rqt, rviz, and robot-generic libraries
- ```
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop
```

Add Individual Packages

You can install a specific ROS package (replace underscores with dashes of the package name):
- ```
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-PACKAGE
```
  - e.g.
```
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-navigation
```

To find available packages, use:

apt-cache search ros-indigo

The Ubuntu ARM package status is available here

Install Sizes

Base Package	robot variant	desktop variant
407 MB	572 MB	~1GB

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/indigo/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/indigo/setup.bash

If you use zsh instead of bash you need to run the following commands to set up your shell:

echo "source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

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

Verifying OS name

Make sure your OS name defined at /etc/lsb-release is as the following. Since ros does not recognize Linaro as an OS, this is necessary. The following is for Ubuntu 14.04, trusty. Modify the release number and name as per your target.

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=14.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=trusty
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04"

Build farm status

The packages that you installed were built by ROS build farm. You can check the status of individual packages here.

Tutorials

Now, to test your installation, please proceed to the ROS Tutorials.

Obtain source code of the installed packages

If you know the location of the repository of each package, you know you can obtain all the code there. But it's often hard even for experienced developers to reach the correct maintained repository of certain packages. Also, in some situations you just want to get the source of the released, installed version of a package. The methods described here the best for these cases.

In earlier days of ROS (supposedly electric or earlier) you can obtain by the way noted in this question.
Now just apt-get source (sudo not needed) as following. You don't even need to explicitly specify deb-src entry etc. This downloads from the server all the files in the released version of the package (i.e. things not installed in the installation rule (e.g. CMakeLists.txt) are also included).
```
$ apt-get source ros-hydro-laser-pipeline
```
Drawback might be that you have to specifify a single, exact package name (asterisk doesn't work).

Using RVIZ

It is not recommended to run rviz on most ARM-based CPUs. They're generally too slow, and the version of OpenGL that is provided by the software (mesa) libraries it not new enough to start rviz.

'IF' you have a powerful board with a GPU and vendor-supplied OpenGL libraries, it might be possible to run rviz. The IFC6410 and the NVidia Jetson TK1 are two such boards where rviz will run, although neither is fast enough for graphics-heavy tasks such as displaying pointclouds.

Note that rviz will segfault if you have the GTK_IM_MODULE environment variable set, so it's best to unset it in your ~/.bashrc:

unset GTK_IM_MODULE

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