Chapter 3: Installing ROS

In Chapter 3 we start to get to the meat of the book, working with ROS. Note there is a v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶  decent Stack-Overflow-like site for ROS where you can ask questions:
http://answers.ros.org/questions/

There is a new release of ROS every year, with releases named in alphabetical order. You can track the distributions at this site (http://wiki.ros.org/Distributions). In the book, Lentin uses Indigo Igloo, the 2014 release (which will be supported through 2019). The 2016 release is called Kinetic Kame, which will be supported through 2021:


I installed Kinetic Kame in my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS [edit: this was a mistake: see below] without too much mishap as described at the ROS site (http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu). The book basically runs through the same procedure, but does give some some more helpful details. I am not a Linux guru, so tend to have to just follow recipes when it comes to installing packages--luckily ROS seems far enough along that things work pretty smoothly.

I've now gotten Kinetic Kame installed and about ready to start actually doing the robotics!
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Update added August 1, 2016:
because the turtlebot and rocon packages are not yet caught up with Kinetic Kame, but are working fine in Indigo, I recommend installing Indigo. Unfortunately, Indigo does not work with Ubuntu 16! So unfortunately for now (as of early August 2016) I recommend installing things exactly as in the book:
Linux 14.04
Ros Indigo Distro

Probably within 6 months to a year, all the ROS packages like turtlebot and rocon will be all caught up with Kinetic Kame, so you can then install Linux 16 (which is frankly a lot better than 14), and the long term ROS Kinetic, etc.. (and pray that the chefBot clone in the book will continue to work!). IF I ever make these upgrades I will update this post.