Before the installation of ROS packages, we must update the system to see all the packages on the ROS repository just added:

$ sudo apt-get update

This part of the installation is slightly different for the BeagleBone Black. There are a lot of libraries and packages in ROS, and not all of them compile fully on an ARM, so it is not possible to make a full desktop installation. It is recommended that you install them package by package to ensure that they will work on an ARM platform.

You can try to install ROS-base, known as ROS Bare Bones. ROS-base installs the ROS package along with the build and communications libraries but does not include the GUI tools (press ENTER (Y) when prompted):

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ros-base

We can install specific ROS packages with the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-PACKAGE

If you need to find the ROS packages available for BeagleBone Black, you can run the following command:

$ apt-cache search ros-kinetic

For example, the following packages are the basics (already installed as ros-base dependencies) that work with ROS and can be installed individually using apt-get install:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ros
$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-roslaunch
$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-rosparam
$ sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-rosservice

Although, theoretically, not all the packages of ROS are supported by BeagleBone Black, in practice, we have been able to migrate entire projects developed on PC to BeagleBone Black. We tried a lot of packages, and the only one that we could not install was rviz, which is indeed not recommended to run on it.