Chica

Preliminaries

• the iCub head called Chica has a PC104 and 1GB of RAM
• for operating system and software, we have the following setups

2008 hard disk setup

This 100GB drive mounts an installation of Windows XP. While having old versions of YARP, iCub (controlGaze2) etc., this setup is quite stable and contains working demos.

2010 solid state IDE drive setup

This 8GB drive mounts Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 32bit, with username icub.

Partitions

Automated partitioning resulted in:

/      7.7GB   ext4
swap   400MB

After the default CD installation, we had 4.8GB of available free space on /.

Network

We configured the internet connection in Systems -> Preferences -> Network Connections:

address 10.10.1.60
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.10.1.254
dns servers: 193.136.128.1

Tweaks to minimize writes on the solid state drive

We implemented suggestions 1-3 of this article:

http://tombuntu.com/index.php/2008/09/04/four-tweaks-for-using-linux-with-solid-state-drives/

Backups (default Ubuntu configurations) are here:

/etc/fstab.bak

Additional packages and environment variables

• We installed some required packages:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make cmake subversion ssh libace-dev libgsl0-dev

• We created a file called ~/.bash_env (used by non-interactive sessions, namely commands launched via yarprun from another machine) containing these lines:

export ICUB_DIR=/home/icub/iCub
export ICUB_ROOT=$ICUB_DIR
export YARP_DIR=/home/icub/yarp2
export YARP_ROOT=$YARP_DIR
export PATH=$PATH:$ICUB_DIR/bin
export PATH=$PATH:$YARP_DIR/bin

• Before the following line of /etc/bash.bashrc

[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

we added this:

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

Subversion security

We have 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. (Don't worry about changing icub's personal ~/.subversion/config file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc setting is used.)

RobotCub software

Following the instructions in article RobotCub software, we installed the yarp2 and iCub repositories with SVN.