New Robot with Ubuntu: Snappy or Traditional Ubuntu?

asked 2015-12-17 21:20:32 -0600

57 ●14 ●17 ●20

I'm just getting started building a new robot using a 6WD wild thumper chassis, an Arduino, and a Radxa Rock quad-core ARM single-board computer.

I've just recently learned about Ubuntu Snappy. The premise sounds awesome: a stripped-down version of Ubuntu designed specifically for running on low-power embedded devices.

The documentation appears a bit sparse, however, compared with all the abundant documentation for traditional Ubuntu OS's.

So I'm wondering: would it be a good idea to use Ubuntu Snappy on my new robot? Is it stable and/or mature enough yet, in your opinion?

Thanks!

answered 2015-12-18 09:03:58 -0600

luketheduke
283 ●24 ●33 ●37

updated 2015-12-18 09:04:21 -0600

It all depends on your skill level and ability to navigate through documentation and tutorials. The short answer: If you are a beginner, go with a traditional Ubuntu version and use the documentation that's there. If you are willing to "trailblaze" a little bit, go with Snappy and be prepared to have little or no documentation/support. The long answer: There are yet no installation instructions on the wiki for snappy, which shows the amount of support. Packages to run ROS with full compatibility on ROS have been made by some people on the side, but I'm not sure if ROS itself is actively working on this. For a beginner, as I am and probably will still be for a while, having tons of documentation is invaluable. With the Ubuntu Trusty Desktop you get just that, tons of documentation and full support. It's really up to you. If you feel like you can handle it without documentation guiding the way, by all means do it.

To specifically answer your question: If you are just starting out, don't use Snappy, otherwise go for it.

Hope that helps,

edit flag offensive delete link

Comments

@luketheduke Yeah, I'm with ya. I am an Ubuntu veteran, with plenty of experience using it on the desktop and navigating docs/tutorials. But I haven't used it much on embedded devices, and I'm almost a total ROS n00b. I think I'll stick with UbuntuARM for now. Thanks