"sudo rosmake" permission denied problem

Question

Hello,

I'm trying to install the rgbdslam package and following the installation instructions here: http://www.ros.org/wiki/openni/Contests/ROS%203D/RGBD-6D-SLAM

I've svn checked out "rgbdslam" and "hogman_minimal" packaged into my "/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks" directory.

When I try to issue the command "rosmake --rosdep-install rgbdslam" it gives an error mid-way into the installation saying "mkdir: cannot create directory `build': Permission denied". Naturally, I tried adding sudo infront of the command, but then I get the error "sudo: rosmake: command not found".

What is wrong?

Here are the lines from my bashrc file, in case this has to do with some incorrect environment paths:

source /opt/ros/diamondback/setup.bash export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/diamondback/stacks:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

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Originally posted by Shark on ROS Answers with karma: 241 on 2011-03-08

Post score: 4

Answer 1

In case someone else stumbles across this question: note that the /opt/ros package directories are intended to be shared by all users on that system.

Modifying their contents is not a good idea.

As shark hinted above, if you need to modify one of the installed packages, check the sources for its stack out of the source repository, placing them ahead of the /opt/ros stacks in the $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. Then, use rosmake normally to build your modified version. That way, tools like svn diff or git diff make it easy to submit your changes as a patch.

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Originally posted by joq with karma: 25443 on 2011-03-09

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 13

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Original comments

Comment by roehling on 2011-12-09:
Oh, sneaky little http://... :-)

Comment by 130s on 2011-12-08:
@Röhling Correct URL: http://answers.ros.org/question/2304/

Comment by roehling on 2011-11-27:
This applies even for a single-user machine. If you have installed ROS via Ubuntu packages, the package manager will not preserve changes you made to /opt/ros, so you will end up like http://http://answers.ros.org/question/2304

Comment by McMurdo on 2012-03-30:
I type rosmake stage and gives the same problem. I haven't changed anything. Just following the instructions

Answer 2

I fixed the problem. Instead of downloading stacks into a restricted folder, downloaded to my own folder and made sure the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH included this new directory. When I ran the rosmake command, it worked.

Another (hacked) solution I found was changing the read/write/exec permissions on the folders within the /opt/ros/.../rgbdslam folders.

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Originally posted by Shark with karma: 241 on 2011-03-08

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 4

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Original comments

Comment by KoenBuys on 2011-03-09:
This hack is unpredictable as a new update might overwrite your changes and delete files.

Answer 3

When checking out stacks from SVN you might want to use the rosinstall mechanism. Download rosinstall from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/rosinstall/ and follow the tutorial. I can see that you have already found a solution for your problem, but the rosinstall setup is quite comfortable (also helpful to quickly setting up environment and path).

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Originally posted by Julius with karma: 960 on 2011-03-09

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 2

Answer 4

I have the same problem when I am installing orocos and i found that change the owner of the directory (using chown )can solve the problem:

chown -R username:groupname \mydirectory

(i.e.)

chown -R robot:robot /home/robot/ros_workspace

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/mandriva-linux/38322-folder-permissions.html

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Originally posted by remlog with karma: 66 on 2012-08-10

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1