Kilted Kaiju Test and Tutorial Party Instructions
Hi Everyone,
As mentioned previously, we’re conducting a testing and tutorial party for the next ROS release, Kilted Kaiju. If you happened to miss the kickoff of the Kilted Kaiju Testing and Tutorial party (video) this morning I have put together some written instructions that should let everyone, no matter their time zone, participate.
TL;DR
We need your help to test the next ROS Distro before its release on 5/23/2025. We’re asking the community to pick a particular system setup, that is to say a combination of host operating system, CPU architecture, RMW vendor, and build type (source, debian, binary), and run through a set of ROS tutorials to make sure everything is working smoothly. Depending on the outcome of your tutorials you can either close the ticket or report the errors you found. If you can’t assign the ticket to yourself leave a comment and an admin will take care of it for you. Please do not sign up for more than one ticket at any given time. Everything you need to know about this process to know can be found in this Github repository.
As a thank you for your help we’re planning to provide the top twenty people who contribute to the testing repository with their choice of either ROS Kilted swag or OSRA membership. To be eligible to receive swag you must register using this short Google Form so we can match e-mail addresses to Github user names and count the total tickets closed.
The testing and tutorial party will close on 2025-05-15T07:00:00Z, but we’re asking everyone to get started right away!
Full Instructions
We’re planning to release ROS 2 Kilted Kaiju on May 23, 2025 and we need the community’s help to make sure that we’ve thoroughly tested the distro on a variety of platforms before we make the final release. What do we mean by testing? Well, lots of things, but in the context of the testing and tutorial party we are talking about the package-level ROS unit tests and anything else you want to test. What do we mean by tutorials? We also want to make sure all our ROS tutorials are in working order before the release.
The difficulty in testing a ROS release is that people have lots of different ways they use ROS, and we can’t possibly test all of those combinations. For the testing and tutorial party we have created what we call, “a setup.” A setup is a combination of:
- DDS vendor: FASTDDS, CYCLONEDDS, CONNEXTDDS or ZENOH
- BuildType: binary, debian or source
- Os: Ubuntu Noble, Windows and RHEL-9
- Chipset: Amd64 or Arm64
If you already have a particular system setup that you work with, we suggest that you roll with that, otherwise feel free to create a new system setup just for testing purposes. If you normally use Windows or RHEL (or binary compatible distributions to RHEL like Rocky Linux / Alma Linux) we would really appreciate your help as we don’t have a ton of internal resources to test these distributions.
Here are the steps for participating in the testing and tutorial party:
-
Please fill out the Google form for your first issue so we have your contact information.
-
First go to the Tutorial Party Github repo and read the README.md.
-
Figure out your setup!
-
Note your computer’s host operating system (either Ubuntu Nobel, Windows, or RHEL-9)
-
Note your chipset, either AMD64 or ARM64, if you don’t know it is probably AMD64.
-
Note your installed DDS Vendor (this varies by host OS).
-
Figure out how you want to install the ROS Kilted Kaiju Beta, your options are:
- Binaries
- Source installation
- Docker – see below
-
Once you’ve got your “setup” all figured out take a look at the open tickets in the tutorial repo (at the bottom of the page). There should be a set of tickets for your “setup”. Click on the links and review the available tickets. If you want to test something other than the available tickets, feel free to open a new ticket and describe exactly what you are testing.
-
Pick a single ticket for your setup and use the assignees option to assign it to yourself. If you can’t assign yourself, leave a comment and an admin will assign the ticket to you
-
Take a look at the ticket and do as it asks in the “Links” section. For example, in this ticket, its links section points you to this tutorial. You should use your new ROS Kilted Kaiju setup to run through that tutorial.
-
Once you complete the links section things will either go smoothly or you will run into problems. Please indicate the results using the check boxes in the “Checks” section of your Github issue.
-
If everything goes well, note as such in your ticket’s comment section. We ask that you attach your terminal’s output as a code block or as a gist file. At this point feel free to close the ticket by clicking “close as completed.”
-
If something went poorly, also note it in your ticket’s comment section. Please include a full stack trace or other debug output if possible. You can use the discussion board or our Discord channel to report issues. To join the Discord server use this link.
If you run into issues please feel free to post them to our discussion board on Github. The testing and tutorial party wraps up on May 15, 2025 , but we’re asking everyone to get started early as we will need some lead time to address any bugs.
Happy testing and thanks for all your help! If you have any questions please include them in the comments.
Docker Containers
As discussed last year, Shane and Martin have worked hard to create ROS Open Container Initiative (OCI) Docker Images for all supported ROS distros. These unofficial OCI Docker images already have a beta version of Kilted Kaiju ready to go.
Try ROS Kilted out on your machine by running:
docker run --rm=true -ti ghcr.io/sloretz/ros-testing:kilted-desktop bash
The images are updated every 6 hours. Keep your copy up to date by running:
docker pull ghcr.io/sloretz/ros-testing:kilted-desktop
We encourage you to use these containers to participate in the T&T Party, or to test Kilted with your existing ROS project. The official docker images will be available shortly after the Kilted release.
If you run into issues with Kilted while using these images or containers to test your personal codebase please use our Kilted issue tracker to report them.
