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Depends on what you mean by ROS installed? You don't _need_ to use catkin to compile your node, but at the very least you need a few libraries and header files "installed" or shipped with your project such that they are avaiable for the compiler. And possibly you need to also ship the generated message header files if you don't have the message generation machinery 'installed'. Jonathan Bohren has some excellent tutorials discussing how to compile a very simple example c++ node step by step with a plain Makefile, using pkg-config manually, with a plain CMakeFile and then catkin. Maybe this helps to understand better how everything ties together: http://jbohren.com/articles/gentle-catkin-intro/