(DRAFT) Installing ROS on Debian/Buster

The ROS packages for Debian do not yet include all packages for a fully functional ROS installation.

This tutorial will describe what you need to do to get a working ROS-setup.

Goal

We will try to compile missing ROS-packages. The goal would be to have a ROS-workspace with all missing packages for desktop-full and then overlay your own ROS-workspace to start actually using ROS.

After that you should be able to mostly follow the ROS-documentation at (wiki).ros.org when learning ROS or to just git clone packages and compile them for your own use. Or develop your own packages based on the underlaying Debian-ROS-Packages or the packages in your underlaying ROS-workspace.

Install ROS

We assume that you are on a system with Debian Buster installed and no other sources are available. (E.g. no mixed setup with stretch and buster packages for example)

You should install every available package that is related to ROS. ros-desktop-full is a good start, but you will need more. Let's see:

# apt install ros-desktop-full
# apt search ros| grep -B1 -i 'robot os'

This should give you a good idea of what is available. Install as much as you can ;-)

You will also need development tools to compile the missing ROS-packages, maybe we also need some Debian tools for rebuilding debian packages

 # apt install build-essential dpkg-dev git 

ROS depends on !OpenCV so install that too. Some ROS-Packages do depend on planning libraries, so we can install them when available.

 # apt install libopencv-dev liborocos-kdl-dev libompl-dev

Building Packages

Tools needed

We will use: rosinstall_generator, wstool, catkin_make, git

When something does not work

Rebuild or Update Debian-Packages from source