If you can live with an older distribution, there are .deb packages available for ROS Electric on Ubuntu Maverick and for ROS Diamondback on Ubuntu Lucid. These packages include pre-built laser drivers.

If you still want to install from source, try the following:

The first tutorial looks like the better one to follow; setup.sh and setup.bash are created by rosinstall.

Regarding dependencies: some of those may already be installed by default. If rospack find <package> returns true, then that package is already installed.

If a package isn't installed, you can use the dependency links to find stack containing that package, and get the source code with rosco --distro=diamondback <stack>

You can then start tracking that package with rosinstall by doing rosinstall ~/ros <stack>

Don't forget to install the dependencies for your dependencies. This may be a bit of chase.

If you have to install pcl_ros, I suggest you edit the CMakelists.txt and Makefile and remove any parallel-build options ( -j or -j<N> )

Once you have all of your dependencies downloaded, you should build your laser drivers using rosmake.