Hi all,

we have a large robotics project here that (still) uses player as robot middleware and gazebo as a 
simulator. After an update to the latest ubuntu 11.10 gazebo 0.9 no longer works, and 0.10 also has 
problems compiling etc. and we want to avoid spending time on getting it to run, also because it 
seems that the only version of gazebo that is actually currently maintained is the one inside ROS.

gazebo in ROS installs like a charm, loads our world files and runs smoothly. So far so good.

But player can not connect to this running instance of gazebo, which runs as a ros node rather than 
a normal executable. There is no libgazeboplugin.so which normally allows player to connect to 
gazebo. I kind of expected that.

However, is there a possibility to get the exact version of gazebo as it is compiled into a ROS 
node, with all the patches applied that are missing in e.g. 0.10, or trunk (and these patches are 
crucial in making the whole thing run properly) and then simply compile as a normal standalone project?

following
   http://answers.ros.org/question/1972/version-of-stage-and-gazebo-in-diamondback#3223
and thus getting
   http://pr.willowgarage.com/downloads/gazebo-r8967.tgz
and applying
   patches/8993_8998_wg_branch_patches.patch patches/bbVisual_offset_bug_fix.patch 
patches/gazebo_pid.patch
plus some more very minor patches of our own only resulted in an executable that segfaulted 
immediately. So that does not seem to be the right way, or I did something stupid on the way.

Sorry if this is not exactly a ROS question, but the gazebo development seems to have moved to ROS, 
hence I expect the experts to also be in this mailing list.

grateful for any help,
Michael