User:1sfoerster/ROS

Problem Statement
Install ROS .. get it to receive input and control output of something simple.

Implementation
Install ROS on as many platforms as possible. ROS is currently only supported on Ubuntu. There is experimental support on many other platforms.

Raspian ROS
An attempt spring 2013 to to install ROS on a Raspbeery Pi, but failed. Raspian was installed successfully but ROS on top of Raspian was not successful.

Debian Wheezy Raspian 2012.12 was installed successfully in order to support ROS install testing on different Raspian configurations.

BerryBoot v2.0 was used to install various operating systems successfully. There were several stumbling blocks that were overcome including:

Symptom:
 * SD cards with Raspbian image from the AV_Share project will result in a blank screen if "startx" is typed.

Solution:
 * To fix this edit the fourth and fifth lines of .xinitrc so that it will open Raspbian instead of Tiny VC. Change the fourth line beginning with "nice..." to a comment by adding the # symbol in the front of the line. Delete the hashtag from the beginning of fifth line "#exec..." to make it a command. Return to the startup screen and punch in "startx" to boot Raspbian.

Symptom:
 * If encountering the error: "PANIC:VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)" "Entering kdb (current=0xdb82ac80, pid 1) due to keyboard entry kdb"

Solution:
 * The best solution is to reformat the SD card and reinstall Raspbian following the steps laid out on the instructables website

ROS Compile Attempt
Setup Ubuntu in Virtual Box and tried to [install ROS. and failed to consistently connect through the virtual network of the Virtual Box.

Installed Qemu which is used to virtually run Raspbian and emulate a Raspberry Pi.

Problem
 * Mount script provided in ROS to Raspbian failed to mount

Solution
 * Ensure script is executable with chmod/chown. Ensure you're in directory of image.  Change "raspbi.img" in script to actual file name.

Mount Errors Failure
Error when trying to get archlinux onto berryboot ... following instructions that required installing mksquashfs and stopped with these error messages:

Next Steps

 * Create dedicated Ubuntu machine that works flawlessly on the internet as starting point to begin installing ROS. Raspbeery Pi is too new and unstable at the moment (spring 2013).