Error installing ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu 16.04

4
votes

When I try to do the following: 

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

I get the following error:

E: Unable to locate package ros-kinetic-desktop-full

Then I try to go for a workaround installing it from source, and once I run rosdep install --from-paths . -i -y --rosdistro kinetic, it throws the following error:

executing command [sudo -H apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-gazebo-dev]
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package ros-kinetic-gazebo-dev
ERROR: the following rosdeps failed to install
apt: command [sudo -H apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-gazebo-dev] failed

Any ideas what went wrong here?

4
ubuntuubuntu-16.04ros
Have you tried answer in here? – Ashish Srivastava
That doesn't work for me. I'm running ubuntu bionic. Which could be why it's not working in my case. – Owl

4 Answers

7
votes

Following these instructions should work. You need to set up your sources.list and keys to get software from packages.ros.org:

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
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full
3
votes

I got it, (finally), so kinetic isn't compatible with my version of Ubuntu. What you need to do is find an appropriate version from here:

http://wiki.ros.org/Distributions

In my case, I am running bionic, so i follow through on that page and eventually i get to install instructions for bionic which are:

apt install ros-melodic-desktop-full

So the key thing here is that ros-"crazy ros name"-desktop-full, where that crazy ros name has to be compatible with your debian / n00buntu version.

Now, it doesn't make it too clear in the instructions that you need to enable universe sources. Go into the /etc/apt/sources.list and uncomment out the universe repositories.

Then do an:

apt-get update

Kinetic should work for you at this point. I suspect this isn't working because you've got the lines:

## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu
## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any
## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team.
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic universe
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic universe
deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates universe
deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ bionic-updates universe

Commented out. (Your lines will be different from these because you are using xenial instead of bionic). But either way these lines need to uncommented and you need to do an apt-get update after saving these changes.

1
votes

This worked for me (using Ubuntu 18.04):

sudo apt install ros-melodic-desktop-full

Reference

1
votes

This worked for me on Ubuntu 20.04

sudo apt install ros-desktop-full