Install ROS on Cygwin

ROS-rc was tested on an Windows XP inside a VMWare virtual machine and one windows xp dual core laptop. I only compiled "$ROS_ROOT/" and assumed the installation is in ~/ros/ I also did some test using "rosmake roscpp_tutorials" and "rosmake rospy_tutorials". They seems to work fine.

Have fun.
tingfan@gmail.com
Originally posted on Tue Jan 5 21:39:58 PST 2010
Updated on Sat Jan 9 16:46:34 PST 2010
Updated on Mon May 10 09:52:14 PDT 2010

Steps

download latest cygwin setup (1.7) and install (default) minimal setting with one additional packages wget, also make sure you have these (default) packages bash, tar, gawk and bzip2 (for apt-cyg).

Install apt-cyg

 
			wget http://stephenjungels.com/jungels.net/projects/apt-cyg/apt-cyg -O /bin/apt-cyg
			or 
			wget http://apt-cyg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/apt-cyg -O /bin/apt-cyg
			then
			chmod a+x /bin/apt-cyg

Now you can install packages with

			apt-cyg -m [mirror site]  install [package name]

There are two sites you need to know.

The official release mirrors, such as

			apt-cyg -m ftp://sourceware.org/pub/cygwin/ install [package name]

Cygwin ports - a separately maintained package repository in complement of the bundled packages
```
			apt-cyg -m ftp://sourceware.org/pub/cygwinports/ install [package name]
			
```

Now, take an exercise installing following tools from the official release mirrors subversion, make, cmake, gcc4, python, pkg-config . I also installed vim.

			apt-cyg -m ftp://sourceware.org/pub/cygwin/ install subversion make cmake gcc4 python pkg-config vim

The rest of necessary packages will be installed by ros automatically using apt-cyg from cygwinports.

Install ROS. We roughly follow the official document at ROS.org.

Install PyYaml (we will the pure-python parser, so don't build the lib)

		  wget --tries=10 http://pyyaml.org/download/pyyaml/PyYAML-3.09.tar.gz
		  tar xzf PyYAML-3.09.tar.gz
		  cd PyYAML-3.09
		  python setup.py --without-libyaml install
		  cd ..

Get rosinstall

			wget --no-check-certificate http://ros.org/rosinstall -O ~/rosinstall
			chmod 755 ~/rosinstall

Checkout source but don't build yet (-n)

			~/rosinstall -n ~/ros http://ros.org/rosinstalls/boxturtle_ros.rosinstall

Environmental Setup - This step is different from the original procedure.
add following lines to the end of ~/ros/setup.sh because some ros executables depend on dlls in these "*/lib" folders.
```
			export PATH=$PATH:$ROS_ROOT/3rdparty/xmlrpcpp/lib/
			export PATH=$PATH:$ROS_ROOT/core/rosconsole/lib/
			export PATH=$PATH:$ROS_ROOT/core/roscpp/lib/
			export PATH=$PATH:$ROS_ROOT/core/roslib/lib/
			export PATH=$PATH:$ROS_ROOT/tools/rospack/lib/
		
```
Do yourself a favor checking `echo $PATH` see if it contains any un-escaped white-space paths such as "c:\Program Files". Mr. Lioutikov (r.lioutikov@gmx.de) suggested inserting export PATH=${PATH// /\\ } into .bashrc.ros to cure the problem. I myself simply don't inherit any path from windows.
```
			echo "source ~/ros/setup.sh" >> ~/.bashrc
			. ~/.bashrc
		
```
Build

		rosmake rostest --rosdep-install --rosdep-yes

message

		/cygdrive/c/prj/ros/ros/ros/bin/rosstack.exe: error while loading shared libraries: 
		cygrosstack.dll: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Done. You can either re-open the cygwin window or type

			. ~/.bashrc

For people interested in the tutorials
Simple Test - Let talker from rospy talk to listener from roscpp. The "windows fire wall" dialog may popout to ask for permission to listen to a port. Just click on "unblock".

	~/rosinstall -o ~/ros-tutorials http://www.ros.org/rosinstalls/ros_boxturtle_tutorial.rosinstall
	echo "source ~/ros-tutorials/setup.sh" >> ~/.bashrc
	. ~/.bashrc
	rosmake roscpp_tutorials
	rosmake rospy_tutorials

In separate cygwin windows, run

	roscore  
	rosrun rospy_tutorials talker.py
	rosrun roscpp_tutorials listener.exe

Known Issues

Executables on windows come with ".exe" suffix. This cause some issue in ros. Sometimes you can fix the problem by adding suffix in the command such has "rosrun roscpp_tutorials listener.exe". However, I think this should be taken care so that one version of code runs everywhere.
ensure there's no spaces in "$PATH" such as "c:/Program Files", this confuses some ROS shell scrips which then produces misleading error msg.
Cygwin seems to have trouble generate static-linked libraries. Therefore there will be additional dlls floating around in ros/*/lib. Maybe someone could help re-write the cmake rules to cure the problem.
What's the difference between ros/rosdep.yaml and ros/tools/rosdep/rosdep.yam?
There are both official release mirrors and cygwin-ports mirrors which complicate the design of rosdep.yaml (need to have some way to denote the origin). Improving apt-cyg to use more than one mirrors could be a elegant solution.