Before we get into setting up ROS on these compute boards, let's try to understand the two most commonly used Linux distributions by the community—Debian and Ubuntu.

As you know, the projects in this book target ROS installed on top of Ubuntu. So, you should be familiar with Ubuntu by now. But how different is Debian? Not much—you simply need to know that Ubuntu is actually derived from Debian. Debian is one of the oldest OSes based on Linux kernels and acts as a base for most of the newer Linux distributions. Ubuntu was released by a private firm called Canonical who intended to produce an easy to use Linux distribution for daily use. The following diagram explains how Ubuntu is derived from Debian:

Some of the notable differences between both is in terms of software packages, ease of use or flexibility, stability, and support. While Ubuntu is easy to use with its GUI approach toward setting up packages, packages have to be manually set up in Debian. But Debian is extremely reliable while installing or upgrading packages compared to Ubuntu as it doesn't need to deal with new addons that act as bugs and lead to either screen blackouts or a popout error message with a sound. Notably, both have their own advantages and disadvantages.

When it comes to SBCs, Debian has been supported widely by the open source community compared to Ubuntu, which began releasing arm-based OSes recently. Notably, for ROS, Ubuntu is considered a better option because ROS was majorly developed on top of Ubuntu. Though ROS is supported on Debian today, the Debian kernels are one of the oldest and sometimes do not support new hardware. Hence, Ubuntu may have a slight edge over Debian. However, we shall see how to set up ROS on both Debian and Ubuntu in the upcoming sections.

Let's start with setting up ROS on Tinkerboard S.