Hydro Full Install on Debian from source

There are no precompiled binaries of ROS for Debian, while it seems that most of the dependencies are being pulled into the main repositories there are still some missing so compiling requires that the dependencies be made from source as well. This tutorial goes through an example of doing this for a machine running Debian Wheezy.

Configure your Debian repositories Setup your computer to accept software from packages.ros.org:

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

Refresh:

sudo apt-get update

Prerequisites

Install bootstrap dependencies :

sudo apt-get install python-rosdep python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential

Next ensure rosdep has been initialized:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Create a catkin Workspace

In order to build the core packages, you will need a catkin work-space. Create one now:

mkdir ~/ros_catkin_ws
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws

Next we will want to fetch the core packages so we can build them. We will use wstool for this. Select the wstool command for the particular variant you want to install: Desktop-Full Install: ROS, rqt, rviz, robot-generic libraries, 2D/3D simulators, navigation and 2D/3D perception

rosinstall_generator desktop_full --rosdistro hydro --deps --wet-only > hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall
wstool init -j8 src hydro-desktop-full-wet.rosinstall

This will add all of the catkin or wet packages in the given variant and then fetch the sources into the ~/ros_catkin_ws/src directory. The command will take a few minutes to download all of the core ROS packages into the src folder. The -j8 option downloads 8 packages in parallel. The time out is fairly quick, so if you have download cuts out the easiest way I found to retry is to delete the .ros install file in src.

Resolving Dependencies

Before you can build your catkin work-space you need to make sure that you have all the required dependencies. We use the rosdep tool for this:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro hydro -y -r --os=debian:wheezy

This will look at all of the packages in the src directory and find all of the dependencies they have. Then it will recursively install the dependencies.

• The --from-paths option indicates we want to install the dependencies for an entire directory of packages, in this case src.

• The --ignore-src option indicates to rosdep that it shouldn't try to install any ROS packages in the src folder from the package manager, we don't need it to since we are building them ourselves.

• The --rosdistro option is required because we don't have a ROS environment setup yet, so we have to indicate to rosdep what version of ROS we are building for.

• The -y option indicates to rosdep that we don't want to be bothered by too many prompts from the package manager. After a while (and maybe some prompts for your password) rosdep will finish installing system dependencies and you can continue.

• The -r flag causes rosdep to ignore minor errors. This is necessary to get the base dependencies installed. After the packages following this section have been installed it would be a good idea to run this command again without the -r to see if there are any dependencies that you forgot or didn't have in your base system (i.e. packages different from what the author of this tutorial had installed).

• The --os flag was necessary for the author because of differences in the way that the wheezy version of debian stores version information and what rosdep is expecting. If you are having trouble with any of the dependencies rosdep is supposed to get, make sure that you have the package name right by getting the rosdep base.yaml from this http://docs.ros.org/independent/api/rosdep/html/contributing_rules.html

Once all of the dependencies below are installed you should be able to run rosdep install excluding the -r option without errors by makeing sure all your dependencies are listed in the base.yaml.

Dependencies not available in the Debian Repositories

At the time this article was written (11/2013) the packages for the following libraries did not exist in the Debian stable repository. Collada and Point cloud needed to be downloaded from their respective developers and compiled. Bullet and Python kitchen are available in the testing/experimental repositories and directions are given to back-port them. Please update this tutorial by removing these steps if you notice that they become available in stable.

One place to do this is in a external folder in your catkin work-space and install checkinstall.

mkdir ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
sudo apt-get install checkinstall

Experimental Dependencies

If you are running Debian wheezy instead of testing or unstable, you need to get some packages that are only available there. These packages in stable and testing/unstable are often not binary compatible so they need to be back-ported as in the following directions.

Get the unstable source in your apt repository lists.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'

Add the wheezy-backports repository in your apt repository lists.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian wheezy-backports main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list'
sudo apt-get update

Installing python-kitchen

apt-get install python-kitchen

Installing Bullet

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
mkdir backports
cd backports
sudo apt-get build-dep libbullet-dev
sudo apt-get -b source libbullet-dev
sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Installing Point Cloud

Install the point cloud libraries from source

sudo apt-get install libflann-dev
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
git clone https://github.com/PointCloudLibrary/pcl.git
cd pcl
cmake .
make
sudo checkinstall make install

When running check-install rename the package as follows and provide lines to libpcl-all-dev to match the rosdep dependency.

Install Collada Dom

Download the collada-dom compressed file (tarball) from the official website.

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
mv ~/Downloads/collada-dom-2.4.0.tgz .
tar -xzf collada-dom-2.4.0.tgz
cd collada-dom-2.4.0
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
cmake .
make
sudo checkinstall make install

• When check-install asks for documentation you need to update the package name from "collada-dom" to "collada-dom-dev" otherwise the rosdep install wont find it.

Installing Gazebo

Player Dependency

Download: http://sourceforge.net/projects/playerstage

Implement this fix: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=From_noreply%40sourceforge.net_Sat_Jul_07_17%3A37%3A11_2012&forum_name=playerstage-developers

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
mv ~/Downloads/player-3.0.2.tar.gz .
tar -xzf player-3.0.2.tar.gz
#fix players libz bug
cd player-3.0.2/
cmake .
make
sudo checkinstall make install

sdformat dependency

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/osrf/sdformat sdformat
cd sdformat
cmake .
make
sudo checkinstall make install

Build Gazebo

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/osrf/gazebo gazebo
cd gazebo
hg up gazebo_1.9
cmake .
make
sudo checkinstall make install

There has been a change in one of the file-names provided by gazebo which ros is not expecting, to fix that for now do the following (the bug has been fixed here https://github.com/ros-simulation/gazebo_ros_pkgs/commit/b52d6bfcb9a786f1b239369d5c06607b204c5d5e):

sudo cp /usr/local/include/gazebo-1.9/gazebo/rendering/rendering.hh /usr/local/include/gazebo-1.9/gazebo/rendering/Rendering.hh

Building Ros

Finally run the build and install command. To install somewhere other than your home directory use the --install-space option.

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws
./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install

Report a Bug

<<TracLink(REPO COMPONENT)>>