Installing ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 22.04

Running ROS1 roscore on Ubuntu 22.04

ROS1 provides robotics tooling from sensor drivers to controls and perception algorithms. It is a key tool used in academia, research, and even the industry.

With the recent release of ROS2, support for ROS1 is slowly fading away even though many current robotics applications still depend on it. Notably the final version of ROS1: Noetic Ninjemys is not supported under Ubuntu 22.04.

This tutorial provides guidance to build ROS1: Noetic Ninjemys for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish).

Content

• Context
• Installation
  - Build tools
  - hddtemp
  - Downloading ROS packages dependencies
  - Patching
  - Building
• Testing the installation
• Troubleshooting
• References

Context

Let’s first try to understand why ROS Noetic is not supported under Ubuntu 22.04. The issues are:

• The main ros-noetic-desktop-full package is not distributed under 22.04. We will have to install from source.
• python3-rosdep and python3-vcstool packages are not readily available under 22.04 (see error below). We will install them from the 20.04 package distribution.

apt-get install python3-rosdep python3-rosinstall-generator python3-vcstools python3-vcstool build-essential
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python3-rosdep
E: Unable to locate package python3-vcstool

• The hddtemp utility needed by the diagnostic_common_diagnostics ROS package is not readily available under Ubuntu 22.04 (see error below). We will install it manually from a .deb package file.

# rosdep install --from-paths ./src --ignore-packages-from-source --rosdistro noetic -y
ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved
to system dependencies:
diagnostic_common_diagnostics: [hddtemp] defined as "not available" for OS version [*]

• rosconsole with log4cxx backend does not compile because of the use of std::shared_ptr in version 0.12 (see error below). We will use a patch from dreuter.

==> Processing catkin package: 'rosconsole'
...
==> make -j16 -l16 in '/root/ros_catkin_ws/build_isolated/rosconsole'
[ 16%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/rosconsole_backend_interface.dir/src/rosconsole/rosconsole_backend.cpp.o
[ 33%] Linking CXX shared library /root/ros_catkin_ws/devel_isolated/rosconsole/lib/librosconsole_backend_interface.so
[ 33%] Built target rosconsole_backend_interface
[ 50%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/rosconsole_log4cxx.dir/src/rosconsole/impl/rosconsole_log4cxx.cpp.o
/root/ros_catkin_ws/src/rosconsole/src/rosconsole/impl/rosconsole_log4cxx.cpp: In function ‘void ros::console::impl::initialize()’:
/root/ros_catkin_ws/src/rosconsole/src/rosconsole/impl/rosconsole_log4cxx.cpp:169:23: error: cannot convert ‘ros::console::impl::ROSConsoleStdioAppender*’ to ‘log4cxx::AppenderPtr’ {aka ‘std::shared_ptr<log4cxx::Appender>’}

• Everything downstream of rosconsole has to be built with C++17 enabled. This is usually fine except for urdf which sets its CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD differently (see error below). We will use a patched version from dreuter.

==> Processing catkin package: 'urdf'
==> make -j16 -l16 in '/root/ros_catkin_ws/build_isolated/urdf'
[ 33%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/urdf.dir/src/model.cpp.o
[ 66%] Building CXX object CMakeFiles/urdf.dir/src/rosconsole_bridge.cpp.o
In file included from /usr/include/log4cxx/log4cxx.h:45,
                 from /usr/include/log4cxx/logstring.h:28,
                 from /usr/include/log4cxx/level.h:22,
                 from /root/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/include/ros/console.h:46,
                 from /root/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/include/ros/ros.h:40,
                 from /root/ros_catkin_ws/src/urdf/urdf/include/urdf/model.h:50,
                 from /root/ros_catkin_ws/src/urdf/urdf/src/model.cpp:42:
/usr/include/log4cxx/boost-std-configuration.h:10:18: error: ‘shared_mutex’ in namespace ‘std’ does not name a type
   10 |     typedef std::shared_mutex shared_mutex;

For reference, these instructions were tested on the following configurations:

• Barebone: Linux my_hostname 5.15.0–53-generic #59-Ubuntu SMP Mon Oct 17 18:53:30 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
• ubuntu:22.04 Docker image:

The steps below mostly follow the Installing from source instructions, but have more prerequisites and dependencies tweaks.

Installation

For this tutorial, make sure you have the following packages:

sudo apt install git gnupg wget

Build tools

First add packages.ros.org as an accepted software provider, but for the previous Ubuntu 20.04 release, focal. This is step is mostly similar to the one listed under Configure your Ubuntu repositories.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu focal main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.asc | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update

You should now be able to install the build dependencies:

sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep python3-rosinstall-generator python3-vcstools python3-vcstool build-essential

Next, we initialize rosdep , the ROS dependencies manager:

sudo rosdep init

hddtemp

Before running rosdep update , we need to install hddtemp for Ubuntu 22.04:

cd ~/Downloads
wget http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/h/hddtemp/hddtemp_0.3-beta15-53_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ~/Downloads/hddtemp_0.3-beta15-53_amd64.deb

We then need to declare it as available to rosdep . For this, create an modified sources list from the rosdep repository:

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/base.yaml

Open the downloaded base.yaml file and modify the hddtempsection to add a jammy: [hddtemp] line. This tells rosdep that hddtemp is indeed present under Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy. After this change, the hddtemp section should something like this (notice the last line):

hddtemp:
  arch: [hddtemp]
  debian: [hddtemp]
  fedora: [hddtemp]
  freebsd: [python27]
  gentoo: [app-admin/hddtemp]
  macports: [python27]
  nixos: [hddtemp]
  openembedded: [hddtemp@meta-oe]
  opensuse: [hddtemp]
  rhel: [hddtemp]
  slackware: [hddtemp]
  ubuntu:
    '*': null
    bionic: [hddtemp]
    focal: [hddtemp]
    impish: [hddtemp]
    jammy: [hddtemp]

Now we just need to tell rosdep to get its sources from our local base.yaml file instead of the one on the online repository. Open /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list as sudo , for example:

sudo gedit /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list

Modify the base.yaml line to get the file locally. The contents of 20-default.list should look similar to this:

NOTE: you need to modify the your_username part below

# os-specific listings first
yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/osx-homebrew.yaml osx

# generic
#yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/base.yaml
yaml file:///home/your_username/Downloads/base.yaml
yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/python.yaml
yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/ruby.yaml
gbpdistro https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/releases/fuerte.yaml fuerte

# newer distributions (Groovy, Hydro, ...) must not be listed anymore, they are being fetched from the rosdistro index.yaml instead

Make rosdep aware of the change with:

rosdep update

Downloading ROS packages dependencies

Create a catkin workspace:

mkdir ~/ros_catkin_ws
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws

Download the source code for the ROS packages. Here we assume that you want all the packages from the ros-noetic-desktop-full install:

rosinstall_generator desktop --rosdistro noetic --deps --tar > noetic-desktop.rosinstall
mkdir ./src
vcs import --input noetic-desktop.rosinstall ./src

Install the dependencies for all those ROS packages:

rosdep install --from-paths ./src --ignore-packages-from-source --rosdistro noetic -y

This step will take a few minutes.

Patching

We are now almost ready to build ROS! We just need to patch 2 packages to make them compatible with Ubuntu 22.04:

• rosconsole : console logging utilities for ROS
• urdf : parser for Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) files

With the magic of open source, and thanks to Daniel Reuter (dreuter) and their contributions, we do have fixes available!

See their repositories:

• GitHub — dreuter/rosconsole (up for review with PR#54)
• GitHub — dreuter/urdf

Backup the original copies of these packages and download the patched versions in the src folder:

# Backup
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/src
mkdir ~/Downloads/backup
mv rosconsole urdf ~/Downloads/backup/

# Download and use fix branch
git clone https://github.com/dreuter/rosconsole.git
cd rosconsole
git checkout noetic-jammy
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/src

git clone https://github.com/dreuter/urdf.git
cd urdf
git checkout set-cxx-version
cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/src

Building

Finally, with the previous fixes out of the way, we can now continue with the instructions from Installing from source:

cd ~/ros_catkin_ws
./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This steps proceeds to build the ROS packages one by one. It can take some time.

If you want to install ROS in the same standard location as in Ubuntu 20.04, you can run with --install-space /opt/ros/noetic .

Testing the installation

Running roscore under Ubuntu 22.04

You can now try to start the roscore to check if ROS1 was installed properly:

source ~/ros_catkin_ws/install_isolated/setup.bash
roscore

You should see:

$ roscore
... logging to /home/your_user/.ros/log/5b726cd6-6b53-11ed-a17b-730ee1817eab/roslaunch-3g96ln3-851647.log
Checking log directory for disk usage. This may take a while.
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Done checking log file disk usage. Usage is <1GB.

started roslaunch server http://your_host:46495/
ros_comm version 1.15.14


SUMMARY
========

PARAMETERS
 * /rosdistro: noetic
 * /rosversion: 1.15.14

NODES

auto-starting new master
process[master]: started with pid [851670]
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://your_host:11311/

setting /run_id to 5b726cd6-6b53-11ed-a17b-730ee1817eab
process[rosout-1]: started with pid [851694]
started core service [/rosout]

Congratulations, you are now running ROS1 under Ubuntu 22.04!

Troubleshooting

If you run into issues, I recommend checking out the References section below. I got a lot of help from those links.

References

1. Installing ROS Noetic from source
2. GitHub — dreuter/rosconsole
3. GitHub — dreuter/urdf
4. ros_from_src: Useful scripts and build instructions for Ubuntu 22.04
5. ROS Answers: [hddtemp] defined as “not available” for OS version [*]
6. ROS Answers: Will ROS Noeric support Ubuntu 22.04?
7. Contributing rosdep rules
8. Codesti: Error when compiling with log4cxx 0.12.0