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Note that the environment setup instructions are critical. Commands like "roscore" won't be available unless you've properly "sourced" a setup.bash file.

Once you've installed ROS via apt-get, it is permanently installed.

Note that the environment setup instructions are critical. Commands like "roscore" won't be available unless you've properly "sourced" a setup.bash ~~file.~~

file. These setup.bash files automatically control a variety of ROS environment variables, and some non-ROS environment variables as well. These environment variables are critical to ROS functionality. Every terminal you open has a different set of environment variables. Meaning, you'll need to "source" a setup.bash file in every terminal you want to use ROS in. The following commands from the installation instructions are actually modify your user's "~/.bashrc" file to force the primary ROS Jade setup.bash file to be "sourced" every time the "~/.bashrc" file is sourced.

echo "source /opt/ros/jade/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Finally note that the "~/.bashrc" file is automatically sourced every time you open a new terminal. Thus if you run the commands above, every terminal should be able to use ROS commands.

Don't worry about the rosversion ros returning <unversioned>. That command used to work, but now AFAIK, ROS versions are no longer numbered. Instead, you should use rosversion -d to see which version of ROS you are using.