Virtual Machine

NOTICE: This page has been updated as of March 6 2023 with instructions on how to set up the newer ROS Noetic environment, and this guide can no longer be used with the older ROS Melodic. If you followed the older version of this guide, we recommend going through it once again to ensure ROS Noetic is used.

The Njord Platform has only been tested on Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04, where Windows 10 is found to be by far the most stable. We therefore recommend running Windows 10, with Ubuntu 20.04 on a virtual machine for best performance. The installation guide includes instructions using VMware Workstation Player, which is free for any non-commercial applications. Alternatively, Ubuntu can be run on a separate computer, which will require some configuration of the network settings.

First, download the Ubuntu 20.04 .iso file which can be downloaded from old-releases.ubuntu.com.

Download the VMware Workstation for Windows installer from this vmware.com and follow the steps in the installer.

Run the program, select 'Create a New Virtual Machine' and choose the downloaded .iso file. Consider customizing the hardware settings (increasing available memory, for example) on the last step before completing the setup wizard.

Once the virtual machine has booted, open a terminal window and install the following dependencies.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git python3-pip

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