Installing ROS Fuerte on Fedora 17 (Failed!)

I just installed a new Fedora 17 system to get familiar with it. Now I am trying to install the brand new ROS Fuerte on this Fedora system following the instructions here.

Everything went fine until the make & install step

make -j8
sudo make install

First, it is better to be cautious and just type

make

without the

-j8

part. Parallel compilation can get you into trouble some times! Second, with the

sudo make install

step, I got an error complaining about the directory ~/ros-underlay/catkin/bin/em is not found. Seems like this directory have to be present as if in a Debian system. So, mkdir ~/ros-underlay/catkin/bin/em solved this problem (apparently!).

Following the instructions with the Desktop-Full install, I got another error at the step

rosdep install -a

ERROR: Rosdep experienced an internal error.
Please go to the rosdep page [1] and file a bug report with the message below.
[1] : http://www.ros.org/wiki/rosdep

Bad installer [yum]: global name 'pkgs' is not defined


Actually, it seems like there is a ticket filed already for this bug here. Following the bug assignee instructions, I downloaded the latest rosdep from github, and then extracted the archive ans installed it using

sudo python setup.py install

The error disappeared. But now I have other errors!

Executing script below with cwd=/tmp
{{{
#!/bin/bash
export PREFIX=/usr/
if [ -f $PREFIX/include/assimp/assimp-version.installed ]; then
  [ 2ed0b9954bcb2572c0dade8f849b9260 = `cat $PREFIX/include/assimp/assimp-version.installed` ]
else
  false
fi

}}}

ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved
to system dependencies:
rxtools: No definition of [swig-wx] for OS [fedora]
python_qt_binding: No definition of [python-qt-bindings] for OS [fedora]
image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
image_view: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
cv_bridge: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
image_rotate: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
opencv2: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
image_geometry: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
cv_markers: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
stereo_image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
opencv_tests: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
depth_image_proc: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
camera_calibration: No definition of [opencv2] for OS [fedora]
pcl_ros: No definition of [pcl] for OS [fedora]


I tried installing the assimp-devel package. But this did not solve the problem. I also installed the opencv-devel and the pcl-devel packages.

At this point, I decided to abandon it altogether, since I need to make a custom YAML config file! Since Fedora was a fresh install anyway, and since ROS only supported Ubuntu officially, I decided to give it a try on Ubuntu 12.04.

Fix to garbled display on booting Ubuntu 12.04 on Dell Vostro 470

Trying to install Ubuntu 12.04 on Dell Vostro 470 gave me all kinds of trouble! At first, the graphical installer did NOT work, so I had to try the text-based installer (aka alternate installer). It was successful, but then I had to manually install the ubuntu-desktop package since I had no desktop installed! Not to mention that I was only able to log in to the system using the Recovery mode from GRUB menu. The default mode was giving me a garbled screen similar to this one, and I could never log into my system.

To fix the garbled display problem, I did what was advised on this page, by changing the kernel command line from 'quiet splash' to 'nomodeset':

1)Edit: /etc/default/grub
Change:
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset"

2) Update GRUB by:
sudo update-grub

Now I can log in to my system from the default entry on GRUB!