Attention: Answers.ros.org is deprecated as of August the 11th, 2023. Please visit robotics.stackexchange.com to ask a new question. This site will remain online in read-only mode during the transition and into the foreseeable future. Selected questions and answers have been migrated, and redirects have been put in place to direct users to the corresponding questions on Robotics Stack Exchange. Additional details are available here.

What is an overlay?

overlay

asked 2012-09-10 14:13:10 -0500

Jackie
103 ●7 ●7 ●11

updated 2012-11-18 23:05:06 -0500

Lorenz

22731 ●129 ●202 ●316 http://ias.in.tum.de/p...

I am new to linux and ROS. Installed ROS successfully and currently following the tutorial. It mentioned in the tutorial "overlay". Could anyone pls brief explain what it is?

Thank you

Jack

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

add a comment

1 Answer

Sort by » oldest newest most voted

answered 2012-09-10 21:35:22 -0500

Lorenz

22731 ●129 ●202 ●316 http://ias.in.tum.de/p...

When installing ROS in Ubuntu from Debian packages, all packages are installed in /opt/ros/... and owned by root. That allows you to use them but not to change any source code or have additional custom packages that are compiled from source. An overlay is essentially a directory somewhere in the user's home directory that contains additional ROS packages. It is basically the user's workspace.