Testing a fresh ROS installation on Slackware 14.2

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Most packages have unit tests; particularly the core ROS packages. These will cover the basics like publish/subscribe, services, message generation, actionlib, and most of the other things that are testable in a command-line environment.

If you built with catkin_make, running tests is just catkin_make run_tests

If you built with catkin_make_isolated, things may be a bit more complicated; I haven't tried it but I think you can run catkin tests in catkin_make_isolated with catkin_make_isolated --catkin-make-args run_tests

Both commands will output the test status as they build, but you probably don't want to sift through all of that. Both runs should produce junit-style test result files; for catkin_make they'll be in the build folder; for catkin_make_isolated they may be scattered around the workspace.

In either case, catkin provides a small command-line tool that will walk the directory tree, gather test result files and summarize them: catkin_test_results

In addition to running the tests, I'd suggest that you run rviz and rqt manually to verify that they work; the GUI tools are rather difficult to test in an automated fashion.