alternative: use ROS pkgs in Debian Sid (Testing)

[gavanderhoorn]

Jochen Sprickerhof, Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda and Thomas Moulard have worked hard to get ROS into the regular Debian repositories. See here for some (incomplete) information, and here for the repositories they use.

Whilst not everything is there and you are limited to a single ROS version, the result of this is that there are relatively up-to-date debs available for the armel arch (as the Debian buildfarm builds for that architecture as well as many others).

To get this on ev3dev, which runs Debian Jessie, I've added the repos for Debian Sid to the apt sources (like this). Purists will not like it, but my EV3 doesn't run any mission-critical systems :). After an apt-get update, you can then proceed to install something like ros-core-dev on the EV3. No source compilation necessary.

Things were quite slow running on the brick (possibly because of file-io), so it's advisable to do this on a desktop machine (using a qemu-arm-static chroot of the ev3dev root fs partition).

[moriarty]

:+1