Hi,
IMHO there is a bug in the configuration tutorial on
http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment
in section 3.2:
If you run the first line of the listing, the $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH variable
is expanded, which should not be done like that. If there is no
$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH set on call time of the command, the string is
expanded to "export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=~/ros_workspace:"
If you want to rosmake your first package this results in
[rospack] Error: package/stack shutter depends on non-existent package
roscpp
Greets,
David