Installing ROS

This page assumes that you have installed ubuntu on a panda board and have been able to boot into the desktop.

ROS provides very good documentation on how to install ROS. There are no pre-built binaries for the panda board, so you will need to download the source from the ROS svn server and compile it yourself.

ROS provides an installation system that, in theory, should do everything for you. In practice, you may run into some bugs.
In step 1.2 of the instructions on the ROS site you will run rosinstall to download and compile all the packages. The downloading of all the code and compiling of the ROS core packages should complete without a problem. However, while rosinstall attempts to compile the ros_comm packages you may run into a internal gcc compiler error. This will terminate the rosinstall and you will need to complete the installation yourself. To finish installation, complete step 1.3 in the instructions so that the compiled ros packages are in your path. Then cd into the ros_comm folder, and run 'rosmake'. This time the ros_comm packages should compile without any errors.