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I am planning to buy a new desktop specifically to use ROS and Turtlebot application. Is there a best option to go after. It would be nice to have a machine with Ubuntue and perhaps ROS pre-installed and a graphic card that is going to be the best option for Gazebo and rviz.
I use a System 76 Leopard Extreme as my desktop, and have been very happy with it. Enough power to run Gazebo and some control code, and zero problems with nVidia video card. Preinstalled with Ubuntu 12.04. I also have a Gazelle Professional laptop, which I'm similarly happy with, although it weighs a ton. The seem to have moved to an Intel graphics card for this, though, rather than the nVidia that I have in mine.
I've got whatever the default option is, and it's fine. A faster/better card will let you render more polygons, but the critical thing, IMO, is the closed-source nVidia drivers.
For choosing the desktop machine itself, I would pick one of the machines under the Ubuntu Desktop Certified Hardware list for 12.04LTS. You should be able to find it with your preferred search engine.This will ensure that Ubuntu itself will run well on the desktop hardware (no weird driver issues).
I don't think there are any Ubuntu installs with ROS already installed. If you follow the groovy install instructions on the main ROS page, it's a pretty quick, painless install using package manager tools. The guide walks you right through it.
Not sure about the graphics requirements for rviz/Gazebo.
I have made a custom Ubuntu 12.04 with ROS groovy already installed: https://sites.google.com/site/gustavovelascoh/content/rosubuntu
Asked: 2013-05-07 11:21:34 -0600
Seen: 1,753 times
Last updated: May 09 '13
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Gazebo requires more power than rviz, for this reason I would ask this question to http://answers.gazebosim.org too If I were you. One has to be quite careful with graphic cards since not all of them work in ubuntu easily