Setting up Ubuntu 10.10, Eclipse and Orocos

Ubuntu or Debian Packages

You can find Ubuntu packages of the Orocos Toolchain in the ROS package repositories. Look for the package ros-<releasename>-orocos-toolchain-ros, which installs the orocos_toolchain_ros version.

There are also build instructions for building some of these packages manually here: How to build Debian packages

The rest of this page mixes installing Java and building Orocos toolchain sources. In case you used the Debian/Ubuntu packages above, only do the Java setup.

Setup

  • Replace Java.
  • Install the GNU Toolchain
  • Get Eclipse CDT
  • Install other Orocos dependencies

Java

I am starting with Ubuntu 10.10. First thing to do is to get rid of the OpenJDK version of Java and install the Oracle (Sun) version of Java using the Synaptic Package Manager.

Do the following in Synaptic at the same time:

  • Search for openjdk- and mark for removal or complete removal.
  • Search for sun-java- and select sun-java6-jdk. Make sure the following are selected too (some might be selected already):

 * sun-java6-bin
 * sun-java6-jre
 * sun-java6-plugin
 * sun-java6-source
  • Apply the changes and exit Synaptic.

GNU Toolchain and C++ Development

Install the following:

  • build-essential
  • automake
  • bison
  • libboost-all-dev
  • cmake

Other Orocos Dependencies

  • libxerces-c-dev
  • doxygen
  • dia-gnome
  • inkscape
  • docbook-xsl

omniiOrb

Using Synaptic get all the omniOrb packages that are not marked as transitional or dbg and have the same version number. (Hint: do a search of omniorb then sort by version) Include the lib* packages too.

Build Orocos

I do not like the bootstrap/autoproj procedure of building Orocos. I prefer using the the standard build instructions found in the RTT Installation Guide

Errata in RTT Installation Guide:

  • you have to cd to orocos-toolchain-2.2.1/rtt/ and then mkdir build;cd build and continue with the instructions.

Make sure to enable CORBA by using this cmake command:

cmake .. -DOROCOS_TARGET=gnulinux -DENABLE_CORBA=ON -DCORBA_IMPLEMENTATION=OMNIORB

OCL

Install:

  • libnetcdf-dev
  • netcdf-bin
  • libncurses5-dev
  • libncursesw5-dev
  • libreadline-dev
  • libedit-dev
  • lua5.1
  • lua5.1-0-dev

cd log4cpp;mkdir build;../configure;make;make install

Now: cd ocl;mkdir build;cmake ..;make;make install

Running Eclipse

JDK BUG for JDK 6.0_18 and above FIX on 64bit systems

Put this in your eclipse.ini file under -vmargs: -XX:-UseCompressedOops

Get Eclipse IDE for C/C++ Developers,. Unzip it somewhere and then do: 

cd eclipse
./eclipse

Creating an Eclipse Project from an Orocos package

You can use Orocos packages in Eclipse easily. The easiest way is when you're using the ROS build system, since that allows you to generate an Eclipse project, with all the correct settings. If you don't use ROS, you can import it too, but you'll have to add the paths to headers etc manually.

ROS users

cd ~/ros
rosrun ocl orocreate-pkg orocosworld
cd orocosworld
make eclipse-project

Then go to Eclipse -> File -> Import -> Existing Project into Workspace and then follow the wizard.

When the project is loaded, give it some time to index all header files. All include paths and build settings in Eclipse will be set up for you.

non-ROS users

You must have sourced env.sh ! 

cd ~/src
orocreate-pkg orocosworld
cd orocosworld
make

Then go to Eclipse -> File > New > Makefile Project with Existing Code and complete the wizard page.

The next step you need to do is to add the include paths to RTT and/or OCL and any other dependency in the C++ configuration options of your project preferences.

»