Hope these kinds of questions are allowed here. On this occasion I’m just looking for a straight answer.

For a university course I need to install ROS - software for doing robotics stuff. Specifically, I need ROS 1 - which is no longer being updated, as ROS 2 is now the focus. The installation instructions are here: https://wiki.ros.org/Installation/Ubuntu

The instructions from the course material say that only Ubuntu 18 would work, though the ROS wiki says Ubuntu 20.04 is the target. Either way, it doesn’t seem to be available for Ubuntu 22.04 and therefore Linux Mint 21, which is what I’m running.

The course instructions generally gives 3 options:

  1. Install ROS on a VirtualBox virtual machine
  2. Install on Windows using WSL
  3. Install on a real Ubuntu 18 system

Right now I’m going to use VirtualBox to get started, but I’d really prefer to run it natively and I’m worried about performance. Is there a simple way to download and run software intended for Ubuntu 20.04 on Linux Mint 21.3?

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    0·
    8 months ago

    You can always try.

    However, be aware that adding third party repositories may cause problems in the future. For example, if you upgrade to a version of Mint that’s based on 22.04 or 24.04, the updater may throw errors or even do an incomplete update because of broken dependency chains.

    If the software you’re using doesn’t depend on (a specific version of) software in the Mint repositories, you should be fine and it shouldn’t matter. I myself have a few external repositories that I know from experience cause no dependency issues. I’ve also had to debug plenty of broken upgrades because of other (popular!) repositories, though.

    You may want to use a tool like Distrobox instead. Binaries running inside Distrobox have close to zero overhead. GPU acceleration can be a bit trickier, but for Nvidia GPUs there are workarounds to maintain full performance.

    You can also try the version of ROS that Ubuntu packages. It’s not the latest version, but it’s guaranteed to work without breaking your software updates or operating system upgrades in the long term.