ICub machines configuration

In this page we will list configurations that are commonplace to machines used at Vislab, particularly Linux machines that work with the iCub robot.

Operating system installation

Nothing fancy here - follow Ubuntu defaults and partitioning. For servers, use LTS releases.

Operations after first boot

• choose Main server (rather than Portugal server, which is not always reliable) as the software repository:
  • on desktop machines, System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager -> Settings -> Repositories -> Download from: Main server
  • on server machines, remove all the "pt." strings from /etc/apt/sources.list with the following command: sudo sed -i 's/pt.//g' sources.list
• update packages:
  • either with Ubuntu graphical frontends
  • or from a Terminal: sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade
• add icub user if not done already:
  • desktops: (to be completed)
  • servers: sudo adduser icub followed by sudo usermod -aG admin icub to give it sudo privileges

Other operations

Network configuration

• manually configuree the internet connection (/etc/network/interfaces):

  auto lo
  iface lo inet loopback
  
  auto eth0
  iface eth0 inet static
  address 10.10.x.y # put your IP here
  netmask 255.255.255.0
  network 10.10.1.0
  broadcast 10.10.1.255
  gateway 10.10.1.254

• optionally, we can customize the /etc/hosts file like we did on Chico3; this would allow us to quickly access other machines, as in: ping cortex1. Alternatively, we can do nothing and just use ping cortex1.visnet (i.e., attach the .visnet part after a machine name, see VisLab network for details).

Essential packages

  sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make subversion ssh libace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev gfortran cmake cmake-curses-gui

Environment variables

• Create a file called ~/.bash_env (used by both interactive and non-interactive sessions, such as commands launched via yarprun from another machine) like this one:

 export YARP_ROOT=/home/icub/yarp2
 export YARP_DIR=$YARP_ROOT/build
 export ICUB_ROOT=/home/icub/iCub
 export ICUB_DIR=$ICUB_ROOT/main/build
 export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin:$ICUB_DIR/bin
 export ICUB_ROBOTNAME=iCubLisboa01
 export IPOPT_DIR=/home/icub/Ipopt-3.10.0 # only for servers
 source $YARP_ROOT/scripts/yarp_completion  

• Then, before the following line of /etc/bash.bashrc

  [ -z "$PS1" ] && return

add this:

  # per-user environment variables (non-interactive and interactive mode)
  source $HOME/.bash_env

Subversion

For security, set the following parameter in /etc/subversion/config:

 store-passwords = no

This implies that SVN will ask you for your password every time you do a commit, as opposed to storing it in plain text on the system. (Don't worry about changing your personal ~/.subversion/config file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc setting is used.)

Additional software

OpenCV

 sudo apt-get install libcv-dev libhighgui-dev libcvaux-dev

YARP and iCub

Follow the instructions on the RobotCub software article. For compilation on servers, do not use sudo make install but simply make (we have configured the PATH variable to find the latest compiled binaries, and we do not want two copies of the same thing on the system).

• usual yarp2 CMake flags

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release
 CREATE_LIB_MATH

• usual iCub CMake flags

 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release

Special machines such as pc104 or iCubBrain need additional flags.