ICubBrain
In June 2009, we purchased "1U Twin" servers that are to be used as iCub Brain (hence the name). The box includes a SC808T-980 1U chassis and two twin X7DWT serverboards. Each of the two boards hosts an Intel Xeon 8-core processor (8 x E5405 @ 2.00 GHz). They are two independent computers, each one with its hard disk, power button, reset button.
For full system specifications, go here (PDF) or on the entry on tsunami.pt
Current setup
| machine | location | operating system | notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| icubbrain1 | left half of chassis | Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 64bit | |
| icubbrain2 | right half of chassis | Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 32bit | has IPOPT 3.9.0 (manual installation according to this page) |
Operating system installation
The chassis contains two separate machines, each one having two hard disk drive drawers. Next, we will explain how we configured the left part of the server, called icubbrain1. The settings for icubbrain2 will be just about the same (unless otherwise noted, see above table), with the last octet of the IP address being 42 instead of 41.
Boot
We booted the Ubuntu Server CD from an external USB CD drive without problems. We then had to manually confirm the usage of a 'cdrom' module within the installation (following all the default selections).
Network interface
icubbrain1 has two Gbit interfaces. First we plugged an Ethernet cable into the first one (which turns on the "1" led in the chassis front). Then, when Ubuntu asked us to choose between eth0 and eth1, we picked up eth0.
Partitions
We chose the 'Guided - use entire disk' option, which yielded the following:
| size | mountpoint | filesystem |
|---|---|---|
| 133GB | / | ext3 |
| 5GB | swap |
Ubuntu installation parameters
- machine name: icubbrain1
- user name: icub
- software selection: OpenSSH
Operations after first boot
- choose Main server (rather than Portugal server, which is incomplete) as the software repository. We do this by removing all the "pt." strings from /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get upgrade
Other operations performed
Network configuration
- manually configured the internet connection (/etc/network/interfaces):
auto lo iface lo inet loopback auto eth0 iface eth0 inet static address 10.10.1.41 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 10.10.1.0 broadcast 10.10.1.255 gateway 10.10.1.254
- added the following lines to /etc/hosts, to enable running commands like: ping cortex1. Note: this is not necessary anymore, see VisLab network
10.10.1.50 pc104 10.10.1.51 icubsrv 10.10.1.52 chico2 10.10.1.53 chico3 10.10.1.1 cortex1 10.10.1.2 cortex2 10.10.1.3 cortex3 10.10.1.4 cortex4 10.10.1.5 cortex5 10.10.1.41 icubbrain1 10.10.1.42 icubbrain2
Subversion
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 your personal ~/.subversion/config file: the parameter is not actually set there, so the global /etc setting is used.)
Additional packages and environment variables
- Install some required packages:
sudo apt-get install gcc g++ make cmake cvs subversion ssh libace-dev libgsl0-dev libncurses5-dev gfortran
- Create 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 export ICUB_ROBOTNAME=iCubLisboa01
In addition, put the following line if on icubbrain1
export IPOPT_DIR=/home/icub/Ipopt-3.6.1 // CHECK
Or these lines if on icubbrain2
export IPOPT_DIR=/home/icub/Ipopt-3.9.0 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$IPOPT_DIR/lib/coin:$IPOPT_DIR/lib/coin/ThirdParty
- Then, before the following line of /etc/bash.bashrc
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return
add this:
# per-user environment variables (non-interactive and interactive mode) source $HOME/.bash_env
Additional software
OpenCV
Ubuntu prepackaged version 1:
sudo apt-get install libcv-dev libhighgui-dev libcvaux-dev
YARP and iCub
Follow the instructions on the RobotCub software article. For compilation, do not do sudo make install.
- Custom yarp2 configuration
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release CREATE_LIB_MATH
- Custom iCub configuration
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE Release ENABLE_icubmod_cartesiancontrollerclient ON ENABLE_icubmod_gazecontrollerclient ON
- Final configuration
yarp namespace /icub
MATLAB
MATLAB R2010a is installed on icubbrain1. The installation of libXp6 was required, it was performed executing the following command.
sudo apt-get install libxp6