Setup OS

In this unit, we will describe the requirements that need to be met in order to execute the Robot Operating System tasks and the Jupyter Notebook tasks of this course.

Contents

• Contents
• Operating System Overview
• Ubuntu
  • Install packages on Ubuntu
  • Install Docker on Ubuntu
• Windows
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
  • Install Ubuntu with Dual Boot or with Virtual Machine
• MacOS
  • Intel Chip
  • Silicon Chip

Operating System Overview

Depending on your operating system, there are several possibilities how to setup the ACDC programming exercises. The following chart should give you an overview about the possibilities and current limitations.

flowchart TD
    classDef bad fill:#f96
    classDef good fill:#99ff66
    A(Windows) --> D(Ubuntu on Dual Boot):::good
    A(Windows) --> W(WSL2):::good

    M(MacOS) --> MIntel(Intel Chip)
    MIntel --> MID(Ubuntu on Dual Boot):::good
    MIntel --> MVM(Ubuntu on Virtual Machine):::good
    M(MacOS) --> MSilicon("Silicon Chip (M1/M2) \n (Limited Support)"):::bad
    
    U(Ubuntu) --> UB(Ubuntu):::good

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Ubuntu

A Linux operating system with sudo rights is the recommended way to work on the programming exercises of this course. The ROS exercises and the Jupyter Notebook exercises are tested on the following distributions:

• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 18.04

Install packages on Ubuntu

In Ubuntu, you can install and update software packages via the terminal (Tutorial), which is called bash in our case. The "Advanced Package Tool" apt is called from the terminal. Download information and updates about new packages from remote package-hosting repositories:

sudo apt update

Now, install the latest package versions.

sudo apt upgrade

Now that you have an up-to-date Ubuntu distribution, you can install additional packages that might be required to clone our repositories or to execute Docker.

• Git (package git) is a version control system, which we use for
  • exchanging source code in between tutors and students
  • tracking changes in the source code during development
  • creating different so-called branches of the code, e.g. for individual exercises
  • If needed, check out this cheat sheet for the most important git commands.

Install git on Ubuntu using the following command:

sudo apt install git-all

Install Docker on Ubuntu

If you have a Ubuntu system running, you can directly proceed with installing Docker on Ubuntu.

Windows

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

We support the usage of WSL2 for the ACDC ROS exercises and the ACDC notebook exercises. WSL will basically integrate a Linux environment into your running Windows system. Please read throught the instructions how to setup WSL2 on Windows: Setup Coding Environment using WSL2

Install Ubuntu with Dual Boot or with Virtual Machine

Furthermore you could install a complete Ubuntu OS on your machine. Either natively as Dual Boot or using a Virtual Machine:

1. Dual boot: Linux lives natively next to your existing operating system (Tutorial).
   • requires a bit more experience since there is more you can destroy
   • better computation performance
2. Virtual machine: Linux lives inside your existing operating system.
   • no risk when installation fails
   • less performance because host and guest OS run simultaneously, but usually enough for this course
   • For Windows as a host system, we recommend VMware (Installation Tutorial).
   • If possible, do not use VirtualBox! It might work, but we know some unresolvable issues with VirtualBox.

Make sure to have at least 40 GB free hard disk space for the Dual Boot or Virtual machine environment !

MacOS

Intel Chip

If you use a Mac with an Intel chip you have two choices to setup the coding environment:

• Install Ubuntu natively as Dual Boot
• Use a Virtual Machine to install Ubuntu. You can take the following instructions if that applies to you: Setup Ubuntu for Intel Mac

Silicon Chip

Silicon Chip denotes the newer ARM64 chip architectures which are also know as M1/M2 chips.

We provide a docker image with limited support for the ACDC programming exercises. Unfortunately, some packages and software that we use in this course do not support the ARM64 architecture for M1/M2 Apple chips. Hence, our image for M1/M2 chips can only be used for a limited set of exercises. The current limitations are:

1. RVIZ is not supported. Visualizations with RVIZ are currently not possible.
2. The package control-toolbox contains case-sensitive files, but the default macOS file system is case-insensitive. Hence, the following, packages won't compile: ct_models, ct_doc, trajectory_planner). Affected exercises are
   • Section 4 Vehicle Guidance - ROS Trajectory Planning
   • Section 4 Vehicle Guidance - ROS Trajectory Control

We are currently working on solving the above mentioned problems in order to give full support for silicon chips.

Note that Docker will automatically download the correct docker image for your architecture. In our dockerhub repository we provide a multi-architecture image for linux/arm64 and linux/amd64. You can simply download the image with

docker pull rwthika/acdc:latest

and docker will pull the correct image for your architecture.