Will any ROS 1 or 2 distribution run on Ubuntu 19.10?

Question

Hi all,

I have a Raspberry Pi 4 that I'd like to run Ubuntu 19.10 on according to these instructions:

https://ubuntu.com/download/iot/raspberry-pi

Whilst I am certainly open to other options, I am drawn to Ubuntu 19.10 because it seems to explicitly cater for the Pi 4. I have read things on various online articles and forums that suggest that other versions of Ubuntu would also run on the Pi 4 but nothing seems quite as simple as the above instructions, which suggests (if only to me!) that it would work nicely without too much hassle.

Based on this, I am trying to work out how best to get some distribution of either ROS 1 or 2 installed and working on Ubuntu 19.10. My preference would be the latest version of ROS 2, i.e. Eloquent, which is due to be released this month, although I suppose that ultimately I'd accept whatever version would work even if that's within ROS 1.

I can't seem to find anything that suggests ROS 2 Eloquent will support Ubuntu 19.10. Is there something I've missed or does anyone recommend a different choice of operating system and ROS version for use on a Raspberry Pi if the latest is unlikely to work?

Thanks :)

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Originally posted by Py on ROS Answers with karma: 501 on 2019-11-03

Post score: 0

Answer 1

Yeah, sorry about that. Looking at future distro information is a little hard to find unless you know where to look.

Noetic (last ROS1 distro) will be targeting Ubuntu 20 (https://github.com/ros-infrastructure/rep/pull/202/files#diff-41ae062315c36c45afaa5c192b2ca7c5R346)

ROS2 will still be Bionic (Ubuntu 18) https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/eloquent/distribution.yaml#L7

So 19 is not supported directly by either at this point.

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Originally posted by stevemacenski with karma: 8272 on 2019-11-03

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1

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Original comments

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2019-11-04:
The wiki/Distributions page does contain information on current releases and links to REP 3. It doesn't show what is being targeted for future releases though, so you'd have to look at the PRs against ros-infrastructure/rep for that.

Perhaps that could be added. done: diff.

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Edit:

Perhaps a link to REP 2000: Eloquent Elusor (November 2019 - November 2020) is easier to parse compared to a key in a distro .yaml file.

Comment by Py on 2019-11-04:
Thanks for clearing this up :) I'm frequently confused that some ROS versions aren't compatible with latest Ubuntu versions, although I'm confident there's a good reason for this.

Comment by gvdhoorn on 2019-11-04:\

I'm frequently confused that some ROS versions aren't compatible with latest Ubuntu versions, although I'm confident there's a good reason for this.

I believe so: "compatible" implies that all packages required to use ROS productively on those newer OS versions build and run. Without someone (or multiple someones) verifying that (ie: by configuring such systems, and checking each and every package) that is not something that could be guaranteed.

So in order to keep maintenance effort reasonable, we have to make choices as to which versions of OS to support. Canonical releases a new version of Ubuntu every year. If we'd keep up with that, it would increase the use of time and effort significantly.

For some more info on this, see Distributions/ReleasePolicy.

Comment by Py on 2019-11-04:
Thats really useful! Thanks very much for the insight :)

Comment by Dirk Thomas on 2019-11-04:
In general there are no Debian packages for non-LTS Ubuntu releases anymore since almost nobody uses them. You can always attempt to build from source.