Update software on Pioneer LX
I have the Pioneer LX robot running on Xubuntu, the 16.04 version. In additino I'm using ROS Kinetic for my project.
The problem is that after learning that Python 2.7 no longer will be supported after 1. jan 2020, we want to update that, and at the same time update both to ROS Melodic and Ubuntu 18.04. I know that Melodic doesn't run on Ubuntu 16.04 which is the version we have been using for development and testing before testing on the robot.
Since we're using the Pioneer LX we are using the original ARIA with the corresponding ros package to interface with ROS, and ARNL has been switched out with the ROS navigation stack. Mobile Sim is not in active use, Mobile Eyes and Mapper3 has been switched out with rqt and rviz. So we need these to work with any updates too.
To summarise we need it to update
- Xubuntu (if it cannot run ROS Melodic)
- Ubuntu to v.18
- Python to Python 3.*
- ROS to Melodic
My question is then, is this possible and how much work is this going to take?
As it doesn't answer the "is it possible and how much work will it be", just a comment: ROS Melodic also still only has packages for the system Python 2. So that will not help you with Python 2 being EOL. But, see Some things to know as Python 2 approaches EOL on ROS Discourse about that.
The next ROS 1 release (Noetic Ninjemys) will support Python 3. If you require Python 3, you could wait for that, but know that it will also require Ubuntu Focal Fossa (so
20.04).If you wan to stick with what you have now (or Melodic), but would still like Python 3, you can build it with Python from source. It will be a bit more work than a simple
apt install ros-melodic-..though. See #q237613 fi for some ways to do that. Note: this would require you to build everything from ...(more)