Install ROS Kinetic on Slackware 14.2

Official Instructions for ROS Kinetic: http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Slackware

Missing package definitions

If during installation you get an error which looks like

<ros-package-x>: No definition of [<package-x>] for OS [slackware]

then read on.

The package dependency list gets updated very often and it might not contain all the definitions for Slackware at all times (if new packages have been added). Sometimes I will fail to keep up and some packages might be missing. Do not worry, there is an easy fix. You need to add a definition for each <package-x> in the above error message. That is, you need to add a mapping between the general name of <package-x> (i.e. the name with which ROS has it defined internally) and the name with which the package is defined in Slackware. This is needed in order for rosdep to be able to automatically resolve the system dependencies that need to be satisfied in order for the ROS installation to be successful.

To add the definitions, follow these steps:

1. Fork https://github.com/ros/rosdistro
2. Clone it to your own machine
3. Find where the missing package is defined in ROS. Specifically, search for the name of <package-x> in one of the following files

• rosdistro/rosdep/base.yaml
• rosdistro/rosdep/python.yaml

4. Find the name of the package as Slackware knows it. Note that you must search the official Slackware mirrors or Slackbuilds.org to find the equivalent pacakge. If you cannot find the package in one of these lists, then it is probably a pure python package and you will need to search for it via pip. Note that sometimes, one ROS package might correspond to several Slackware packages. NOTE: ROS uses the Ubuntu package definitions. When searching have in mind that on Slackware one package might correspond to several Ubuntu packages and thus the names might not match exactly. The cases in which there will be no Slackware package will be very very unlikely. Note that if you add the wrong Slackware equivalent, then the ROS installation will later fail.
5. Add the package definition. There are three ways to do so, depending on whether the package is from the official Slackware mirror, Slackbuilds.org or pip:

• Slackbuilds.org. The definition should look like

<package-x>: [<slackware-package-x->]

• Official Slackware package. The definition should look like

<package-x>:
  slackware:
    slackpkg:
      packages: [<slackware-package-x->]

• pip package. The definition should look like

<package-x>:
  slackware:
    pip:
      packages: [<slackware-package-x->]

Just try to follow the syntax in the file.

6. Commit your changes and push them to your fork on GitHub.
7. Redirect your sources list. You need to edit the file /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list and make the links inside point to your fork on GitHub. For example if you modified rosdistro/rosdep/base.yaml, you need to change

yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/rosdep/base.yaml

to

yaml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<your-username>/rosdistro/master/rosdep/base.yaml

Save and exit 8. After you are done, run

rosdep update

This step will make your installation of rosdep fetch the sources as defined in your fork. Note that you might need to clear the rosdep's cache for the update to take place. To clear the cache, run

rm -rf ~/.ros/rosdep/*

9. If everything is successful, you can submit a pull request to https://github.com/ros/rosdistro so that others can benefit.

NOTE: You might also find https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md to be helpful.

Known Issues:

1. Compiling the OpenCV3 ROS package when CUDA is available runs into errors. A messy fix at the moment. Seems like an upstream problem

2. A clash between a library compiled by ROS which is also called cv2.so and the system OpenCV library. Details here: https://answers.ros.org/question/272355/opencv-python-system-conflict/

3. PCL works only with QT4. See perception_pcl.pathc and PCL package on SlackBuilds.org.

4. Also check this file with possible dependency issues