Fedora 16 / Electric: Installation / Path Question

asked 2012-03-03 04:23:40 -0600

Ciaraldi
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updated 2014-01-28 17:11:34 -0600

ngrennan
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I am new to ROS. I just installed ROS (Desktop full) on a 64-bit Fedora 16 system using the instructions at http://www.ros.org/wiki/electric/Installation/Fedora . I did an su to root, then installed to /ros so it would be available to all users. I had two minor problems (and possible solutions):

1) During installation it could not find Python SVN support, so it said to install python-svn. At least in Fedora 16 the package does not exist under that name; it is called pysvn. I installed that, then ROS installed without errors, as far as I could see.

2) I followed the instructions and modified my .bashrc file and that looks OK. Then I continued to the ROS Tutorials pages: http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment . My ROS_ROOT was /ros/ros . I created a ros_workspace directory under my home directory. Then I went to add my workspace to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH, which already had about two dozen directories in it (they looked OK). The instructions said to add my workspace and /opt/ros/electric/stacks to ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Of course /opt/ros did not exist, so I figured I would just use something like /ros/ros/electric/stacks . I used the "find" command and there is no directory electric or directory stacks anywhere under /ros . I tried just leaving that directory out of the path. But then I continued to the next page of the tutorial: http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials/NavigatingTheFilesystem . and typed rospack find roscpp and it could not find that. So I used find to find roscpp and it was at /ros/ros_comm/clients/cpp/roscpp . So I added just /ros to my ROS_PACKAGE_PATH and now rospack can find roscpp.

So anyway I think I have my installation working. Does anyone know if this is the best way? And how do we get the instructions changed? Thanks.

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answered 2012-03-03 12:46:23 -0600

TheLegace
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updated 2012-03-03 12:48:15 -0600

On non-Ubuntu installs all ros installation and package files will be stored in your home directory... ~/ros will contains all the binaries including roscd, rosmake, roslaunch, etc. etc...

Your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH will contain all the packages that will be accessible by the ros commands. If you create another directory where you want to write all your packages you have to add to the setup.sh bash file located at /home/user/ros and then run

source ~/ros/setup.sh

You path will also become changed so that way you shell will have access to the ros programs.

To fix your problems just modify the setup.sh file providing you haven't changed it and messed up something, but your probably haven't. Add your directory to the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH variable.

Also understand your workspace should not be going anywhere near /opt/ this is a global root user location for programs and files and should be touched at all, and left to automatic installation that occurs only in Ubuntu.

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Thanks for the info. As I mentioned in the original posting, I tried to install ROS in /ros so it would be accessible to all users on the system. Since I am the only user it is not a hardship to install it under my home directory, but that seems a strange way to do it.

Ciaraldi ( 2012-03-03 13:17:00 -0600 )edit

What is different about Ubuntu that ROS should be installed in /opt, as compared with other distros where it should be in someone's personal directory? Just wondering...

Ciaraldi ( 2012-03-03 13:20:21 -0600 )edit

Generally because A) ROS doesn't officially support other distros and there just way to many linking issues and B) As oppose to Ubuntu you have to manually compile all the packages in other distros

TheLegace ( 2012-03-03 20:06:40 -0600 )edit

Generally because A) ROS doesn't officially support other distros and there just way to many linking issues

TheLegace ( 2012-03-03 20:06:41 -0600 )edit

Generally because A) ROS doesn't officially support other distros and there just way to many linking issues

TheLegace ( 2012-03-03 20:06:42 -0600 )edit

Generally because A) ROS doesn't officially support other distros and there just way to many linking issues

TheLegace ( 2012-03-03 20:06:43 -0600 )edit

As of Fuerte the build system is being redesigned to support install targets. Prior to Fuerte there was a lot of hacks and tricks to get the installation into /opt/ros to work when packaged.

tfoote ( 2012-04-26 23:05:55 -0600 )edit

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answered 2012-03-03 20:10:47 -0600

TheLegace
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Generally because A) ROS doesn't officially support other distros and there just way to many linking issues because of the various ways distros do things.

B) As oppose to Ubuntu you have to manually compile all the packages in other distros. Things aren't guaranteed to work so it's not really the safe bet system wide...

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