ROS is only officially supported on Ubuntu or Debian, with other platforms being experimental or unofficial. We recommend installing Ubuntu for desktops or laptops and Ubuntu Mate for the Raspberry Pi.

Download Ubuntu Mate Xenial 16.04, choosing the Raspberry Pi architecture.

The image is compressed. On Windows you can use a tool like 7-zip to decompress it. On Linux and MacOS you can use the following command:

xz -d filename.xz

Now we need to write the image file onto the microSD card.

On Windows we can use Win32 Disk Imager.

On Linux we use the dd command.

First we need to find our SD card using the lsblk command. When you have found the name, you can unmount it.

# Find the SD card
lsblk

# Unmount the SD card
sudo umount /dev/sd<?><?> 

# Copy the image to the SD card
sudo dd if=ubuntu-mate-16.04.2-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img of=/dev/sd<?> bs=4M

The dd command will take a long time to complete and does not give any feedback. Be patient...

On MacOS we also use the dd command, but it is slightly different than for Linux.

# Find the SD card
diskutil list

# Unmount the SD card
sudo umount /dev/disk<?>s<?>

# Copy the image to the SD card
sudo dd if=ubuntu-mate-16.04.2-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img of=/dev/disk<?> bs=4m

Once the USB stick is made, boot onto the SD Card and follow the install procedure. Once Ubuntu is installed, continue with the instructions below.

Install Git.

sudo apt-get install git

Once Ubuntu is installed, we need to configure the sources to accept software from the ROS repositories:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

After that, you can install ROS by issuing the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full

This may take a while...

Tip: To find available ROS packages you can use the following command:

apt-cache search ros-kinetic

Initialize rosdep:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

ROS needs to setup a lot of environment variables to work properly. It is easier if they are loaded automatically when you launch a terminal. To do this, we copy the setup code into our .bashrc file:

echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential