The official ROS page shows that as platform supported are: Ubuntu and Ubuntu (armhf). Also, it's supported from source.

Install ROS is a Debian box is not a trivial thing. OSRF(current ROS maintainer) provides packages for Ubuntu generated using a tool (bloom). They are installed in /opt/ros/$rosversion and doesn't obey FHS. This point has been discussed in the past [ 1,2], but and some efforts has been done to accomplish it, but it's implementation has show some drawbacks hidden in the ROS implementation.

Also, some GNU/Linux distributions are more strict than other, but for example Debian requires that any library installed has defined a SONAME.

The initiative of packaging ROS for Debian was initiated by Thomas Moulard for the debian-science group and continued by Jochen Sprickerhof and Leopold Palomo-Avellaneda. The sources of the packages are hosted here.

We have created a set of packages of the core of ROS plus other extras. Currently (May 2015) we have more than half of the packages of desktop_full installation. The packages have been build for: Debian Jessie and Stretch(sid-testing) and Ubuntu Trusty.

All the packages comes from the same sources and we just have recompiled in a clean environment for the selected distros. They are more or less lintian clean, but we are still under development. They obey FHS and have the needed SONAMES. The aim of all this effort is to upload them as official packages in Debian.

All the installations need the packages created and some part compiled. Also, with a few steps in the environment. With the base of the packages, you can compile almost all the packages created for ROS. To use them try: