OS Install

The hardware configuration of Robucar on-board PC(ARK-5280)

CPU: Intel Pentium-M 1600MHz
RAM: 464 DDR SDRAM
There are two hard drives that comes with Robucar:
a 4G CF card

and a 40GB 2.5 inch IDE HDD.

The default embedded XP comes in the CF card. We are going to install the linux system to the HDD.

Which Linux distribution to use?

Ubuntu is by far the best Linux distribution to support ROS.
This computer has limited computing power and RAM. It does not meet the minimum system requirement of Ubuntu. We decided to use Lubuntu which is a fast and lightweight alternative of Ubuntu. It uses a different desktop environment called LXDE. It can work on machines with 256 MB of RAM. This page gives a list of different derivatives of Ubuntu.

Download and install

Download the installation ISO here. It is called an alternative installer, which is a non-graphical installer image used for computers with less than 700MB RAM.

Follow the instructions here to create a bootable USB drive. I used the utility "startup disk creator" on Ubuntu since I had a PC running ubuntu.
For those of you who use Windows, the "linux live usb creator" should work. But if not, try using Grub4DOS

Two IDE channels in the BIOS settings:
Primary Master: HDD - Lubuntu.
Secondary Master: CF Card - Embedded XP.

Install the MBR(GRUB) on the HDD, so that it doesn't affect the original system. Anytime we want to switch to the other OS, we only need to go to the BIOS settings to change the boot priority of the disks.

Note that the GRUB will show a menu of bootable OS which includes the option to boot from XP. This method doesn't work, because both IDEs are in primary mode.

Partition Info for Lubuntu:

Name	Space
/boot	300MB
swap	1GB
/	38.7GB