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View Full Version : FRCSim on Windows 10 Linux Subsystem


Jdkmotorhead
23-12-2016, 00:05
When the Windows 10 Anniversary Update came out, Microsoft released the Windows Subsystem for Linux (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux) as a beta Windows feature, which essentially installs Ubuntu 14.04 LTS on your Windows 10 PC. A while ago I was experimenting with running FRCSim on an Ubuntu laptop I had laying around. Installing the Linux subsystem on my Windows 10 laptop got me thinking; would it be possible to install the simulator on Windows 10, using the Ubuntu subsystem? Has anyone tried this, or are there any reasons that it wouldn't work? And if you could get it to install, would you also have to install the Linux version of Eclipse in order to push code to it?

solomondg
23-12-2016, 00:46
Don't think it would work, for many reasons. Biggest one of which is that FRCSim/Gazebo is going to expect to be running under the X11 Window Server, which is basically how everything you see on linux that isn't a straight-up full screen console works (press ctrl-alt-f2 or ctrl-alt-fn-f2 on the ubuntu laptop to see what I mean, same thing but with f7 gets you back to GUI mode). As well, Gazebo is going to need GTK/QT (window theming), and a window manager, and all of that. You could probably get it to work with a ton of work and Xming or something (X11 for Windows, basically), but I'd say it's not worth the effort.

euhlmann
23-12-2016, 07:32
I've tried it (using xming), and gazebo just crashes immediately. It's not even because of graphics, but instead because WSL's networking stack sucks

[Err] [Connection.cc:738] EXCEPTION: Unable to get local interface addresses

[Err] [Connection.cc:738] EXCEPTION: Unable to get local interface addresses

Gazebo multi-robot simulator, version 6.6.0
Copyright (C) 2012-2015 Open Source Robotics Foundation.
Released under the Apache 2 License.
http://gazebosim.org

getifaddres: Invalid argument
[Err] [Connection.cc:738] EXCEPTION: Unable to get local interface addresses

terminate called after throwing an instance of 'gazebo::common::Exception'

I bet if the networking problem were solved, then it would crash because of graphics