What to do after cross-compiling source with catkin?

edit

You are very close. In principle, you just need to move the install directory to your target machine and assuming everything was properly compiled (and you have installed the dependencies in your target machine) then everything would work.

The problem is that the installation will inevitably have some harcoded paths, so you need to make sure that the install directory in your compile machine is the same as in your target machine.

The easy was to do this is to install to somewhere in opt, (eg. /opt/ros_xc), opt is great for this sort of thing as most linux distros expect to have optional software there.

To change the default installation directory just go to your catkin workspace and issue:

rm -rf build devel install # Make sure we start with a clean install
catkin_make -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/ros_xc # /opt/ros_xc can be chaged to something else
cd build/
make install # You may need sudo in front of this command

Note I've avoided the standard ros installation directory, if you want to install to /opt/ros/distro/ and you have ROS already installed in your compiling machine you'll need to setup a chroot.

You may also have problems with permissions once you move to the target machine, if so just make sure everything is owned by root:

chown -R root:root /opt/ros_xc # May need sudo in front, directory may change.

Good luck!