Interface Kinect Depth Camera to Ubuntu Linux

Testing environment: Ubuntu 10.10 64bit

This tutorial on ROS.org provides an excellent walkthrough http://www.ros.org/wiki/kinect/Tutorials/Getting%20Started

Caveats: to launch the visualization at the last step, it seems the configuration file has to be “/tmp/kinect.vcg” exactly. I have changed to other location with the same file name, it turned out not to work, even the launch command has been changed accordingly.

[Update: Feb 25 2011]

Later on I figured out that Openni.org also provides a nice interface package for Kinect on Linux machines. Here are the steps I followed that verified to work (mostly inspired by this post for Windows).

• Download and install the necessary driver from SensorKinect. There are stable (master) and unstable distributions available, and the stable version is recommended (the unstable version doesn’t compile on my Linux even with all dependencies settled). In the unzipped folder, find Platform > Linux-x86 > CreateRedist, and run the script ./RedistMaker. In Platform > Linux-x86 > Redist, run sudo ./install.sh.

• Install the lastest LibUSB.

   sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev freeglut3-dev  

• Download and install Openni, PrimeSense Nite, and Primesensor in order.  After downloading from the three links, respectively. One needs to unzip the compressed packages,
  • http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-binaries/21-stable
  • http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-compliant-middleware-binaries/34-stable
  • http://www.openni.org/downloadfiles/openni-compliant-hardware-binaries/32-stable

and in each package, install the package by running sudo ./install.(ba)sh.

• Test the demo samples. In OpenNi > Samples > Bin > Release, run ./NiViewer to get realtime scene and depth map viewing.

TeX杂文——转自ChinaTeX新浪博客

看到ChinaTex 新浪博客上的一些有趣的博文，多是LaTeX使用技巧及工具推荐。摘录一些比较高级的文章，链接如下。

• LaTeX上标下标的设置
• 在博客中插入LaTex数学公式（wordpress就稍胜一筹，有嵌入的对Latex的支持功能。另外这个latex2wordpress 插件的开发使大量的公式的嵌入变成小菜一碟）

Settling OpenCV2.1 on Ubuntu

My Linux workstation has been upgraded all the way from Ubuntu 7.10 to 10.04, never missing a major release. And this possibly has created left garbages behind and hence caused itches. For example, I have never succeeded compiling and installing OpenCV on.  (What a pity and shame for a vision researcher! 🙂 )

Yesterday after a normal maintenance update, the box wouldn’t run smoothly. After desperately trying to  solve the problem for several times, without success, I turned to decide to make it a reincarnation. And …. 6 hours later, after the lengthy backup process, I installed the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04, Lucid) and was rewarded with another blessing: OpenCV2.1 now settled on it without any problem. Cheers! And as well thanks to this guy for his helpful blog.

SSH timeout problem in Ubuntu 10.04

Upgrading from previous versions of Ubuntu may result in the problem. Some simple research suggests it may be because SSH client confuses IPv6 with IPv4. So  the workaround is to force the IPv4 search only:

ssh -C  -4 idmsj@xxx.xx.xx.xxx

Btw, my blog received 1,000 hits by yesterday! 🙂

Ubuntu 10.04 Arrives!

Ubuntu 10.04 arrives

http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/1004features

Count down: Ubuntu 10.04 (LTS)

“Undefined References” Errors in gcc/g++ Compiling

(For C/C++ compiling in Linux-like environments with GCC)

The two probable causes,

1)      External libraries are not completely acknowledged

2)      External libraries are not properly acknowledge