Turtlebot (clearpath) Kinect Visualization Tutorial

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I was able to solve the problem by upgrading the turtlebot laptop to Fuerte.

Hi,

I have read through several posts on this particular problem, unfortunately was not able to solve it using the hints given in other threads. First off, about my setup: I have ROS Fuerte running on my workstation while it's the fresh electric install on the netbook. ROS_HOSTNAME is set to the workstations IP, the master uri to the laptop's IP and corresponding port. ROS_HOSTNAME on the laptop is set to its IP, likewise the master uri (again on port 11311). As for the SDK, I installed the ros-fuerte-clearpath-turtlebot package, because I was unable to fetch the dependencies for the electric SDK using Fuerte (maybe using two different versions is the root of all evil?)

I can bring up the dashboard from my workstation without any problems, the only warnings I get are about ROS being unable to fetch information in the laptop's battery charge state. I can set the robot to full mode and breaker 0 turns green. Also, I have no problem firing up kinect via roslaunch turtlebot_bringup kinect.launch. I have also followed the note in the turtlebot bringup tutorial saying that one should "roslaunch openni_camera openni_node.launch" after charging the turtlebot, nevertheless no matter whether I use the former, the latter or roslaunch openni_launch openni.launch, I am unable to get any visualization using the camera input in rviz on the workstation. If I run rostopic list on the workstation there are several camera and kinect_laser topics, nevertheless rostopic echo does not show any messages being sent to the workstation. rosout does not show any broadcasting information with regards to the camera (if there should be any).

What am I doing wrong? Should I upgrade the turtlebot laptop's ROS to Fuerte as well? What is the corresponding SDK to download? Am I even using the right SDK on the workstation? Why is there absolutely no output if I try echoing the camera topics?

edit: by the way, the green light on the kinect is flashing. Is it supposed to flash or is this due to some problem that might be related to power shortage (e.g. USB-driver related as some other topic suggests)?

edit2: the workstation is running ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the turtlebot laptop runs ubuntu 10.04 LTS (the differences on the platforms are not intentional, I had my ROS installed on the workstation beforehand and considering it's not my own turtlebot, I did not want to induce huge changes to the system).