Install ROS

The ROS documentation provides a complete installation guide. The following instructions are a summary of their article.

Attention

Since Ubuntu 18.04, Canonical decided it was a good idea to have unattended updates running in the background. This might lead to error messages similiar to:

E: Could not get lock /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (11: Resource temporarily unavailable)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), is another process using it?

If you encounter them after running anything related to apt: no worries. Just wait until the backgroud updates are finished.

Hint

We use copy-buttons, i.e. a copy-button appears when you hover over a code-block. This makes copy-pasting easier than manually selecting the code-block.

../_images/copy-button.png

Preparation

  1. Enable universe repository

    $ sudo apt install software-properties-common \
&& sudo add-apt-repository universe

  2. Add the key

    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl -y \
&& sudo curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -o /usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg

  3. Add sources

    $ echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu $(. /etc/os-release && echo $UBUNTU_CODENAME) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null

  4. Update

    Warning

    This is critical!

    $ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Installation

  1. Install ROS

    $ sudo apt install ros-iron-desktop-full

  2. Install build dependencies

    $ sudo apt install ros-dev-tools python3-pip python3-rosdep

  3. Set up rosdep

    $ sudo rosdep init && rosdep update

  4. Source the ROS installation

    $ echo 'source /opt/ros/iron/setup.zsh' >> ~/.zshrc

  5. Apply the changes to your .zshrc

    Either close and reopen all open terminals or run the following command in all terminals:

    $ . ~/.zshrc

A Brief Test

Managed to follow the instructions until here? To give you a bit of a good feeling, we try to run the following command

$ ros2 run turtlesim turtlesim_node

A window appears? Lucky you! If no window appears, try to figure out what went wrong or ask your favorite research associate for help.

You can stop the program with Ctrl + C.