In this section you have installed ROS 2 on Ubuntu and configured your environment.

That was quite a lot of things, but you’ve made it, congratulations! The installation process is maybe not the funniest one, but a necessary one.

Quick recap on which ROS 2 version to use:

• Use the latest LTS ROS 2 version. For now this version is ROS 2 Jazzy (released in 2024). Note: if you’ve already started with ROS 2 Humble, no problem, this is an LTS release too and will still be supported until mid-2027.

• Sometimes you may wait a little bit more (6 months to 1 year) before using the latest LTS, because some needed packages are not ported yet. In this case keep using the penultimate LTS.

About the (non ROS-specific) tools I use:

• IDE and text editor: VS Code and gedit. Feel free to use any other IDE you want, it’s best that you keep using the tools you’re more comfortable with.

• To have multiple terminals on screen: Terminator (Ubuntu). If you don’t want to use Terminator, you can just open multiple terminals and tabs inside terminals. Another well known program similar to Terminator is tmux.

And one thing to remember:

Always source your environment before you use ROS 2, otherwise you’ll get an error.

• "source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash" (put this in your ~/.bashrc)

• Change "jazzy" with whatever ROS2 distribution you're using.

Alright, now you’re fully ready to go to the next step, and start writing your own ROS 2 programs!