[ros-users] Ros installation without root

[Tully Foote]

Hi Kai,

I think that making ROS run on a 4 year old system is going to be a very
hard challenge.  4 years ago ROS was not even released.  Overall I would
suggest that you consider looking at using more modern machines or possibly
VMs if performance is not going to be stressing the hardware.

If avoiding the constraints is not possibly I would suggest that you look
at using a chroot.  You should be able to setup a full image of a more
recent distro inside the chroot in user space and then be able to use all
the standard tools within that chroot to do a normal installation.

Tully




On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 8:25 AM, Jonathan Bohren
<jonathan.bohren at gmail.com>wrote:

> Kai,
>
> Could you use Gentoo Prefix and then follow the ROS Gentoo installation
> tutorial?
>
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/prefix/
>
> I've never tried it, but it might be able to do what you guys need.
>
> -j
> On Jan 24, 2013 3:38 AM, <Kai.Krieger at dlr.de> wrote:
>
>> Hello Everybody,
>>
>> Thibault Kruse told me that it would be a good idea discussing this topic
>> in this mailing list. Regarding from ros answers:
>> http://answers.ros.org/question/52981/ros-installation-without-root/
>>
>> Here the communication:
>>
>> 2_socke asked:
>> ############################
>> I suppose that it happens quite often that people that are working in a
>> closed environment without root access want to use ros. cf.
>>
>> howto install w/o root priviliges
>> http://answers.ros.org/question/44030/howto-install-wo-root-priviliges/
>> Installation of wstool and rosdep from source
>> http://answers.ros.org/question/52190/installation-of-wstool-and-rosdep-from-source/
>>
>> In our case for ros fuerte for example we ended after 2 weeks of work
>> with  a big shell script downloading all the system dependencies (like for
>> example BOOST, Log4cxx, PCL or OpenCV), installing it to $ROS_ROOT/usr and
>> after that building ros form source while patching many CMakeLists.txt
>> files. I took a look at groovy and suppose that at least the building of
>> ros with catkin should work quite fine due to the fact that building flags
>> can be passed directly to cmake. Now the question: Wouldn't it be nice for
>> people working in such an environment to get a package manager installing
>> packages from source? This could be then called by rosdep. With this it
>> would be also possible to install ros on every Linux as the native package
>> manager does not need to be called. If there is interest in something like
>> that, I would like to work on such a software package.
>>
>> KruseT answered:
>> ############################
>> I assume you mean a new custom package manager written for ROS and any
>> Linux. Similar projects exist such as pkgsrc, autoproj, jhbuild. Also e.g.
>> see robotpkg. If you want a solution like that, it would be wise to look at
>> either of these first.
>>
>> The following is mostly my personal opinion:
>>
>> The ROS community decided rather to avoid own tooling as much as
>> possible, and rely on existing package-managers where possible. The main
>> problem is the effort that it takes to maintain any toolset, dragging down
>> ROS resoures that could work on something else instead. The catkin build
>> system is geared towards making it much easier to package software for
>> plenty of different *nix systems, and patches to CMakeLists and such to
>> make a package more compatible will also be accepted.
>>
>> So if you want to put effort into something, for groovy it would probably
>> be more appreciated if you either created packaging for a not-yet supported
>> Linux distro or maintained instructions for how to install no a not yet
>> supported distro, see http://www.ros.org/wiki/groovy/Installation
>>
>> PS: For a larger audience, this could be discussed at ros-users, maybe.
>>
>> ####################
>>
>>
>> The problem as I see is that in administrated IT infrastructures normally
>> it is not possible to update system libraries that easy. Of course our
>> administrator could install a newer boost version, but if half of the rest
>> of the system is not running anymore this is a really bad idea. The normal
>> update cycle of such a system is about 4 years. And of course packages like
>> ros needs to be installed globally to everybody. The question is, if there
>> is a tool that could install the ros system dependencies to a different
>> location and could also be included inside rosdep like any other package
>> manager.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> German Aerrospace Center
>> Robotics and Mechatronics Center
>>
>> Kai Krieger
>> Mit freundlichen Grüßen
>> _______________________________________________
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>> ros-users at code.ros.org
>> https://code.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-users
>>
>
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>


-- 
Tully Foote
tfoote at willowgarage.com
(650) 475-2827
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