This page explains how to configure a new Ubuntu 18.04 machine for running lab software. We currently use ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18.04. Some of our software may still be compatible with our previous platform (ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04), but we do not support it.
These instructions only need to be done once per machine; see the development environment guide for setting up our development environment and building our software.
Install the full ROS distribution. See the official ROS installation instructions for more information and troubleshooting help.
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ros-melodic-desktop-full
If ROS was installed previously, you may have an old ROS repository key. Remove the key from your apt keyring. Details about the server breach can be found here.
$ sudo apt-key del 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116
Our development process makes heavy use of git, pip, wstool, and
catkin-tools. To install these packages, run:
$ sudo apt-get install git python-pip python-catkin-tools python-wstool
$ sudo pip install -U pip # upgrade outdated pip in Ubuntu packages
$ catkin --version # check that Catkin is working properly
Anaconda may conflict with your ROS installation. For example, catkin build
may fail and report that python-catkin-tools does not exist. The easiest fix
is to use the system installation of Python instead of Anaconda. Change the
PATH in your .bashrc file from "/home/anaconda3/bin:$PATH" to
"$PATH:/home/anaconda3/bin". In a new shell, which python should now point
to the system Python.
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:dartsim/ppa
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:personalrobotics/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
We use rosdep to install system dependencies used by our Catkin packages. To initialize rosdep and add our custom source entries, run:
$ sudo rosdep init
$ sudo wget -P /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d https://raw.githubusercontent.com/personalrobotics/pr-rosinstalls/master/rosdep/10-pr.list
$ rosdep update
Before you make your first commit, please set your username and email address. You should also add the same email address to your Github account by running:
$ git config --global user.name 'John Smith'
$ git config --global user.email 'john.smith@example.com'
Optionally, you may want to enable credential caching. This allows Git to temporarily "remember" your password, which is invaluable when using wstool to checkout a large number of private Git repositories. To enable this, run:
$ git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=900'
Finally, you may want
to set the default behavior of the git push command. This
is necessary to suppress a warning in the version of Git distributed for Ubuntu
18.04. To do so, run:
$ git config --global push.default simple