Taylor Alexander's profile - activity

Ah I finally got my install working!

Turns out I had the same problem as this person: http://answers.ros.org/question/107/missing-dependency-roscpp

I am green with Linux so it took me a while as I was missing some of the basics. I will do my best to explain what I did so others have a chance at fixing it.

Someone above mentioned .bashrc, but I didn't even know what it is. Well, its in your user folder (/home/taylor in my case) but it is hidden. So open up Nautilus (the file browser), navigate to your user folder, and press Ctrl-h to toggle hidden files if you don't see .bashrc. bashrc runs when you open up a new terminal (I think) and it sets up the environment variables for the terminal session. Anything put in there gets run.

Well, the ROS installation wiki says to add "source /opt/ros/diamondback/setup.bash" to the end of your .bashrc file. So, /opt/ros/diamondback/setup.bash is a script that gets run when your terminal opens. It runs a file in that same folder called setup.sh, which sets the ROS environment variables.

You can't just set environment variables in your .bashrc file because it will just overwrite some of the stuff that the setup.sh file does. So, navigate to /opt/ros/diamondback/ and open setup.sh for editing. Unfortunately, its set as read only for the user. I'm sure this isn't the right way, but I fixed that by opening a Nautilus browser window as root, by typing

sudo Nautilus

in a terminal.

With a root Nautilus window, navigate back to /opt/ros/diamondback/ and edit setup.sh to add the new folders that contain the packages you want to use.

Specifically, there should be a line:

export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks

add your user folder to that line like so (where you replace my name with your user name!)

export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks:/home/taylor

I also saw another folder mentioned and decided to add it just to be safe, so my whole line read like this:

export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks:/home/taylor:/home/user/ros/ros-pkg

Now close all your terminal windows and run

rosmake --rosdep-install rgbdslam

It should find all your packages and build properly! It did for me and I finally have it running. :) If there are any problems, run

sudo apt-get update

To update your packages and try again.