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I used both ROS Melodic and Kinetic on WSL and there's a couple of problems:

  • WSL don't support access to hardware until now, thus, you can't use usb_cam to grab images from the camera for example, or any other sensor
  • WSL only run commandlines and no Display, which means you can't use GUI applications (rviz, rqt...) using the official WSL tools, but hopefully we can use a 3rd party XServer tool for this (such as MobaXterm) which works fine
  • I couldn't run gazebo simulations on WSL: in ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18 I get this error Controller Spawner couldn't find the expected controller_manager ROS interface, while in ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16 I only get a black screen with no error messages.

Given all these problems, I suggest you to not use ROS on WSL for now and prefer using ROS directly on Windows or in VM with Ubuntu. I never used ROS on Docker so I can't talk about this one.

I used both ROS Melodic and Kinetic on WSL and there's a couple of problems:

  • WSL don't support access to hardware until now, thus, you can't use usb_cam to grab images from the camera for example, or any other sensor
  • WSL only run commandlines and no Display, which means you can't use GUI applications (rviz, rqt...) using the official WSL tools, but hopefully we can use a 3rd party XServer tool for this (such as MobaXterm) which works fine
  • I couldn't run gazebo simulations on WSL: in ROS Melodic on Ubuntu 18 I get this error Controller Spawner couldn't find the expected controller_manager ROS interface, while in ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16 I only get a black screen with no error messages.

Given all these problems, I suggest you to not use ROS on WSL for now and prefer using ROS directly on Windows or in VM with Ubuntu. I never used ROS on Docker so I can't talk about this one.

Edit (aug 2019): I could finally run gazebo simulations on Melodic and WSL Ubuntu 18.04, but not on Kinetic with WSL Ubuntu 16.04 (still get black screen). Thus, if you want only to use ROS with simulations you can go for WSL with Ubuntu 18 and ROS Melodic, but if you plan to use real robots, or hardware (cameras, imu, lidars...), or ROS Kinetic, you should definitely go for the pure windows version or the VM.