Virtualbox

Raspberry Pi VM Setup

This HOWTO follows the work by Russell Davis for setting up a cross compiling environment for the Raspberry Pi. I have modified his instructions to make them more ROS specific.

If you don’t already have Virtualbox and the Extension pack installed then you’ll need to download it from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads, choosing the correct one for your platform and also download the Extension Pack from the same page if you haven’t already installed it. Once you have downloaded and installed Virtualbox+Extension pack for your platform move on to step 2.

  1. You can download the Ubuntu iso from the Ubuntu website
  2. Once you have the Ubuntu iso downloaded, start Virtualbox and create a new Virtual machine by clicking the New button. Virtualbox will then start the Virtual Machine Wizard. Give your VM a name. I suggest something like RaspberryPi Development. Choose Linux & Ubuntu from the dropdowns (or if you are not going to use Ubuntu as the guest os then select whichever distro you are going to use). It should look something like this
  3. Choose the amount of memory to allocate to the VM, give it 1 or 2 GB of ram.
  4. Create a virtual harddisk and choose VDI which will be dynamically allocated. Make it at least 8GB to hold everything. The harddisk will resize dynamically.
  5. Click the Create button. You will then be returned to the main Virtualbox screen with the VM you have just created highlighted click the Settings button.
  6. Now open up the setting for the VM you just created. The only setting you MUST change:
  • storage
  • networking
  • video
  1. Go to the storage tab and click the little CD icon. Add the iso you downloaded earlier from Ubuntu. This will only effect this boot cycle. After you install Linux, the disk image will automatically be removed.
  2. Go to the networking tab and ensure NAT is selected so you can see the interweb. This will also allow you to install updates and 3rd pa
  3. Go to the video tab and sensure 3D acceleration is turned off and there is enough video memory for your VM ... I selected 32 MB.

Install Linux

Now hit start on the Virtualbox screen and install Linux.

If you this error message:

piix4_smbus 0000.00.07.0: SMBus base address uninitialized - upgrade bios or use force_addr=0xaddr

Fix based on work by Karl Foley, in a terminal type:

sudo vi /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add the line blacklist i2c_piix4 to the end of the file and save

sudo update-initramfs -u -k all
sudo reboot

Also make sure you have the development tools installed

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Also to reduce the size of the install, I uninstalled office, game, and other unneeded software.

Bonjour

see kinect/README.md

SSH Server

see kinect/README.md

VM Commands

VBoxHeadless –startvm vb_ros

VBoxManage controlvm vb_ros poweroff | pause | reset

Networking

In order for your vm to see the internet and other attached vm and computers, you must use a bridged connection. However on OSX the bridged network doesn’t work if you are using a wireless connection (airport). A real wired connection works fine in OSX (10.8.2 tested).