Installing ROS on Linaro Image from source
If you want to skip this tutorial, you can download a SD card image from
and start with a groovy installation with OpenCV but without PCL. Install from source requires that you download and compile the source code on your own. Beware it might take days to compile natively on an embedded device for the desktop package and you will have to fix a few things described in the respective section. To speed things up, it is recommended to set up a chroot environment.
Contents
Get latest Linaro Image
On your Linux workstation do
sudo apt-get install git linaro-image-tools git clone git://github.com/gumstix/Gumstix-Overo-Linaro.git
Now you need to create the image.
linaro-media-create --rootfs ext3 --mmc gumstix.img --dev overo --hwpack Gumstix-Overo-Linaro/Gumstix-Overo-Linaro-armhf-HWPack.tar.gz --binary Gumstix-Overo-Linaro/Gumstix-Overo-Linaro-Precise-ALIP-armhf-RootFS.tar.gz
This will take a while (15 minutes), so feel free to grab a coffee
Now you can dd the image to a SD card and stick it into the gumstix or you can set up a chroot environment which will speed compilation up by magnitudes
Set up chroot environment and increase image size
This is only needed if you want to speed up the installing process by working on an image instead of natively compiling on the embedded device. Install qemu, and increase image size
sudo apt-get install qemu qemu-user qemu-user-static kpartx qemu-img resize gumstix.img 13G
Unfortunately using gparted on this image will not work. I tried multiple ways and this is the only way I got work. Create device maps from the partition table and symlinks for gparted
sudo kpartx -a gumstix.img ls /dev/mapper/ ln -s /dev/mapper/loop0p1 gumstix.img1 ln -s /dev/mapper/loop0p2 gumstix.img2
Increase the size of the image using gparted
sudo gparted gumstix.img
Right click on the ext3 partition -> Resize/Move. Use all unallocated space to resize. As you might see, gparted converted the unallocated space to used space. That was not so cool. Exit gparted, delete the device maps, then create them again and start gparted afterwards using those commands.
sudo kpartx -d gumstix.img sudo kpartx -a gumstix.img sudo gparted gumstix.img
gparted will still see the new space as used. Now here comes the trick: Resize the ext3 partition again by making it just a tiny bit smaller. Apply your changes. If everything worked, gparted will now find the free space and you can resize it to the full size again. Exit gparted and be happy!
Now we need to mount the right partition. To find out the offset you can use parted
parted gumstix.img WARNING: You are not superuser. Watch out for permissions. GNU Parted 2.3 Using /home/frk1pal/gumstix/gumstix.img Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands. (parted) unit Unit? [compact]? B (parted) print Model: (file) Disk /home/frk1pal/gumstix/gumstix.img: 13958643712B Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: msdos Number Start End Size Type File system Flags 1 32256B 54525439B 54493184B primary fat32 boot, lba 2 54525952B 13958643711B 13904117760B primary ext3 (parted) quit sudo mount -o loop,offset=54525952 gumstix.img /mnt sudo mount -o bind /proc /mnt/proc sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev sudo mount -o bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts sudo mount -o bind /sys /mnt/sys
To be able to use chroot, copy the executable (only needed once)
sudo cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /mnt/usr/bin/ sudo chroot /mnt
To eliminate warnings
locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 cp /proc/mounts /etc/mtab
Congratulations! You are now inside your gumstix without the need to own one 
Another good thing about that is that whenever the tutorial tells you to run a command using -j1, you can change it to whatever number fits your CPU best.
If you ever feel like leaving the chroot, press Ctrl + D
Set up Linaro
You will need to do a few things before you can use the Linaro installation
dpkg --configure -a printf "nameserver 8.8.8.8" > /etc/resolv.conf ping google.com
If the ping works, you are ready to go.
apt-get update apt-get upgrade
If you compile using the image file, it will not be able to upgrade all packages due to missing /proc/cpuinfo. Those packages failing are not needed for the future installations, so the errors are ignored and assumed to go away when using the real gumstix. I ended up uninstalling those packages because I do not think I will need them anyways.
Installation setup
This will walk you through the installation step by step
Install binaries
Install "some" prebuilt binaries. You might not need all of them depending on the ROS variant you plan to install, but it is easy and "fast" to do.
apt-get install build-essential python-yaml cmake subversion wget python-setuptools mercurial git-core libapr1-dev libaprutil1-dev libbz2-dev python-dev libgtest-dev python-paramiko libboost-all-dev liblog4cxx10-dev pkg-config python-empy swig python-nose lsb-release python-wxgtk2.8 python-gtk2 python-matplotlib libwxgtk2.8-dev python-imaging libqt4-dev graphviz qt4-qmake python-numpy libtiff4-dev libpoco-dev assimp-utils libtinyxml-dev python-pydot python-qwt5-qt4 libxml2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev bison++ automake autoconf easy_install wstool rospkg rosdep
Setup catkin
create a workspace
mkdir -p /opt/ros/groovy/catkin_ws cd /opt/ros/groovy/catkin_ws
Now download all packages for the variant you choose to install. This tutorial will install the desktop variant, feel free to try out a different one
wstool init src -j1 http://packages.ros.org/web/rosinstall/generate/raw/groovy/desktop cd src; wstool set swig-wx https://github.com/ros/swig-wx.git --git -y ; wstool update swig-wx; cd ..
Comment - Marcus - 2013/03/13: I believe swig-wx is obsolete. On my x86 installation the only package depending on it are the old rxtools. The current desktop rosinstall does not contain them any more.
Install dependencies
Ensure rosdep has been initialized and update it:
sudo rosdep init rosdep update
ROS does not detect Linaro as an OS right now, so you might need to add a few lines to os_detect.py
/comment Marcus: I was able to run rosdep/roscore without the changes below.
vi /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rospkg-1.0.18-py2.7.egg/rospkg/os_detect.py
Add the following lines
OS_UBUNTU='ubuntu'
OS_LINARO='linaro'
OsDetect.register_default(OS_UBUNTU, LsbDetect("Ubuntu"))
OsDetect.register_default(OS_UBUNTU, LsbDetect("Linaro"))Before you can build your catkin workspace you need to make sure that you have all the required dependencies. We use the rosdep tool for this. The -y option automatically accepts download and the -r option will ignore errors. After the installation, we call rosdep again and check what packages have not been installed.
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro groovy -yr rosdep check --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro groovy
The following sections are instructions on how to install the missing libraries
Threading Building Blocks (libtbb-dev)
cd /opt wget http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/sites/default/files/software_releases/source/tbb41_20130116oss_src.tgz tar -xf tbb41*tgz ; rm tbb41*tgz cd tbb41* make
I am not sure if that is the right approach, but since make install did not exist, I just copied the .so files from the build folder to /lib
mv build/linux_armv7l_gcc_cc4.6_libc2.15_kernel2.6.32_release/*.so* /lib
yaml-cpp
Do NOT download the latest version, it will not work because they changed the API. Version 0.2.7 works just fine if you compile it as a shared library.
cd /opt; wget http://yaml-cpp.googlecode.com/files/yaml-cpp-0.2.7.tar.gz tar -xf yaml-cpp-0.2.7.tar.gz cd yaml-cpp-0.2.7; cmake -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=ON .; make install -j1
collada-dom
apt-get install libxml2-dev cd /opt; wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/collada-dom/files/latest/download tar -xf download cd collada-dom-2.4.0; cmake . ; make install -j1
OpenNi
If you want to use OpenNi, now is the time to install it.
apt-get install default-jdk freeglut3-dev
If you really want to build the documentation as well feel free to install doxygen. After that, I dd-ed it back and mounted it again. To install OpenNI, do this
cd /opt; git clone https://github.com/OpenNI/OpenNI.git cd OpenNI/Platform/Linux/CreateRedist vi ../Build/Common/Platform.Arm
Uncomment the softfp buildflag in this file and remove the function to automatically find the number of jobs in this file.
vi Redist_OpenNi.py ... MAKE_ARGS += ' -j1' ...
Now you can install in using
./RedistMaker.Arm ./install.sh
PCL
Delete the -march=native flag
cd catkin_ws/src/pcl vi cmake/pcl_find_sse.cmake
Set endian
/comment Marcus: My ARM board was correctly detected to use little endian.
vi io/include/pcl/io/ply/byte_order.h
It will check for the architecture in this file, defining either PLY_LITTLE_ENDIAN or PLY_BIG_ENDIAN. Arm will most likely not be detected, so you can remove the #error from the else statement and define the correct value. If you are using a gumstix, it will most likely be #define PLY_LITTLE_ENDIAN
If you are not using a chroot environment, this will take about 24 hours. So get your fastest PC with the most cores and set up chroot!
Install ROS
I removed all qt files from the source folder because one of them had a build error and I do not need any GUI
cd /op/ros/groovy/catkin_ws rm -rf src/qt* rm -rf src/rqt*
Now we can install ROS.
./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated -j1 --install