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Hello,

ROS is highly distributed across a large number of repositories since it is largely community-sourced, so there is no single repository we can point you to. The core tools are at: https://github.com/ros/ros_comm and that's a good place to start. Then, search for each package you need and get its source. Those core tools are enough for message passing and such. If you need help finding a specific package (ie if your using your HPC for map building you would need to get https://github.com/ros-perception/slam_gmapping and also find all of its dependencies) then let us know and we can try to help find a source.

On the topic of being heavily tied to Ubuntu: ROS will build on any linux system (in theory), the problem is that the dependency tree is so huge that it is generally not practical to install everything from source. For instance, if you wanted to install rviz then you'd need (among other things) PCL, and just building the entire PCL dependency tree entirely from source is a nightmare (in my experience). So package managers simplify everything by allowing the community to move forward with development without worrying about spending literally days finding and building huge dependency trees.

Hope this helps, Tim Sweet

Hello,

ROS is highly distributed across a large number of repositories since it is largely community-sourced, so there is no single repository we can point you to. The core tools are at: https://github.com/ros/ros_comm and that's a good place to start. Then, search for each package you need and get its source. Those core tools are enough for message passing and such. If you need help finding a specific package (ie if your using your HPC for map building you would need to get https://github.com/ros-perception/slam_gmapping and also find all of its dependencies) then let us know and we can try to help find a source.

On the topic of being heavily tied to Ubuntu: ROS will build on any linux system (in theory), the problem is that the dependency tree is so huge that it is generally not practical to install everything from source. For instance, if you wanted to install rviz then you'd need (among other things) PCL, and just building the entire PCL dependency tree entirely from source is a nightmare (in my experience). So package managers simplify everything by allowing the community to move forward with development without worrying about spending literally days finding and building huge dependency trees.

Hope this helps, Tim Sweet

Hello,

ROS is highly distributed across a large number of repositories since it is largely community-sourced, so there is no single repository we can point you to. The core tools are at: https://github.com/ros/ros_comm and that's a good place to start. Then, search for each package you need and get its source. Those core tools are enough for message passing and such. If you need help finding a specific package (ie if your using your HPC for map building you would need to get https://github.com/ros-perception/slam_gmapping and also find all of its dependencies) then let us know and we can try to help find a source.

On the topic of being heavily tied to Ubuntu: ROS will build on any linux system (in theory), the problem is that the dependency tree is so huge that it is generally not practical to install everything from source. For instance, if you wanted to install rviz then you'd need (among other things) PCL, and just building the entire PCL dependency tree entirely from source is a nightmare (in my experience). So package managers simplify everything by allowing the community to move forward with development without worrying about spending literally days finding and building huge dependency trees.

Hope this helps, Tim Sweet

Edit:

To address your second question of how to build ROS: you'll need catkin (and more specifically: catkin_make_isolated ) from https://github.com/ros/catkin which can be used to build everything, assuming you have already solved the dependency tree problem.