Glad I'm not the only one who found this challenging. The good news is that I've got it working, I think.
The authoratative instructions for installing FRCSim should be here:
https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s...anually-ubuntu. They are currently out of date but I have it working on LinuxMint18 and am reasonably confident that if you use the updated version of Gazebo v7 and the 2017 version of the simulation plugins you’ll be OK. Specifically:
Their “Install Gazebo” step has you use a version-specific shell-script. Try this instead:
sudo apt install gazebo7
Their “Install WPILib Gazebo Plugins” step points you to an out-of-date archive that is built against Gazebo6. Try this instead:
http://first.wpi.edu/FRC/roborio/mav...n-2017.1.1.zip
Similarly, they have you install the libgazebo6-dev package. Use libgazebog7-dev instead.