Chica/Archive

This page is kept for historical purposes only. If you want current information, go back to the Chica article.

March 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 /.

Show boot menu

We commented this line in /etc/default/grub:

#GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0

Then we ran sudo update-grub.

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

To enable suggestions 1-3 of this article, use /etc/fstab.optimizied as fstab.

Right now we do not use those tweaks, using the default /etc/fstab.bak as fstab.

Additional packages and environment variables

• We installed some required packages:

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make cmake cmake-curses-gui subversion ssh libace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev
sudo apt-get install libcv1 libcvaux1 libcvaux-dev libcv-dev libhighgui1 libhighgui-dev opencv-doc python-opencv

• We created a file called ~/.bash_env (used by interactive and non-interactive sessions, including commands launched via graphical demo managers and yarprun) 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. In the CMake configurations, always set this for performance:

CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release

For the actual compilation, use

make

and do not run sudo make install afterwards.