The practical aspects of this chapter require you to have access to a desktop computer or laptop with either of these two Ubuntu versions:
- Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial
- Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic
Long-term support (LTS) Ubuntu versions are maintained by Canonical for the next 5 years. Also, these kind of versions are released in even years. Hence, Ubuntu 16.04- released in 2016- will be maintained up to 2021, while Ubuntu 18.04- released in 2018- will be maintained up to 2023. We will not consider odd-year versions, that is, Ubuntu 17 or Ubuntu 19 because they are development releases that are not LTS.
Open Robotics releases a new version of ROS every year coinciding with every Ubuntu version. The correspondence is as follows:
- ROS Kinetic running under Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial
- ROS Melodic running under Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic
The most used version as of the writing of this book...
