Ros
ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.
Contents
Setup Notes - Jade
For ROS Jade, see Installation Instructions for jade in Arch Linux.
Setup Notes - Indigo
For ROS Indigo, see Installation Instructions for Indigo in Arch Linux.
Setup Notes - Hydro
For ROS Hydro, see Installation Instructions for Hydro in Arch Linux.
Ogre 1.8
You may want to use ogre 1.8 (aur package) if you want to use gazebo. In order to compile some hydro packages that requires ogre (like rviz) you can add this export to the pkgbuild:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/OGRE-1.8/lib/pkgconfig/:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH
Setup Notes - Groovy
ROS Groovy core, comm, and robot variants have meta-packages that should install all the necessary packages: ros-groovy-rosAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror], ros-groovy-ros-commAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror], (TODO: robot metapackage). In addition, ros-groovy-rvizAUR[broken link: archived in aur-mirror] (along with its dependencies) has a package.
The packages are all available in the maintainer's github: arch-ros-stacks. Not all packages there are in a working state, so use with caution. Please, report any issues with the packages on their respective AUR pages.
Usage Notes - Groovy
Due to the fact that Ubuntu and Arch handle the python2/3 binary split differently, catkin_make[_isolated] will not work on its own. To use these commands, create the following aliases in your ~/.bashrc (or equivalent):
alias catkin_make='catkin_make -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python2 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python2.7 -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/libpython2.7.so' alias catkin_make_isolated='catkin_make_isolated -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python2 -DPYTHON_INCLUDE_DIR=/usr/include/python2.7 -DPYTHON_LIBRARY=/usr/lib/libpython2.7.so'
Without these lines, cmake will default to python 3, which you do not want. It is also possible to simply add the defines into any call of catkin_make[_isolated] (which you have to do if you want to call those commands within a script).
For further information on how to use ROS, see the ROS Tutorials.
Rebuild when boost is updated
When you update a library that ROS depends on, e.g. boost, then you need to rebuild all the packages that link to it. You can search for the packages, with a command similar to the one below. You can use the output from that to rebuild the AUR packages with your favorite AUR helper/wrapper.
export LANG=C;grep -r "libboost" /opt/ros/indigo | awk '{ print $3 }' | grep opt | pacman -Qo - | awk '{ print $5 }' | tr '\n' ' '