Installing ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04.2

Question

System Information:

No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 14.04.2 LTS
Release: 14.04
Codename: trusty

Error message we get:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:

ros-indigo-desktop-full : Depends: ros-indigo-desktop but it is not going to be installed
                          Depends: ros-indigo-perception but it is not going to be installed
                          Depends: ros-indigo-simulators but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

If I explore the error message further, this is what I get:

ros-indigo-cpp-common : Depends: libconsole-bridge0.2 but it is not installable
                        Depends: libboost-all-dev but it is not installable
                        Depends: libconsole-bridge-dev but it is not installable

Answer 1

My suggestion would be to delete the old installation as manual installations of dependencies may be too much. I have written a complete end to end blog on the installation of ROS Indigo over Ubuntu 14.04.

Answer 2

I have successfully installed ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04. So be assured that it can be done.

I have seen many of these errors when installing ROS packages. There seems to be some error in the package management system in Ubuntu (aptitude). You may try

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -f

If it doesn't work, try to manually install some dependencies by

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-simulators
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-perception

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

For those whom still had problems after trying everything.

I have tracked dependencies and found out that the problem is libboost, I had the version 1.55 but some of ros-indigo modules require the 1.54 version Try these commands

 sudo apt-get install libboost1.54-tools-dev
 sudo apt-get install libboost-tools-dev
 sudo apt-get install libboost-mpi-python1.54.0
 sudo apt-get install libboost-mpi-python1.54-dev
 sudo apt-get install libboost-mpi-python-dev

then you can finally

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full

Hope this helps