Installing on Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat)

The instructions for Ubuntu are a sequence of commands to run in a terminal. Some of the commands involve sudo, which means you may need to provide your sudo password, and that the commands have the potential to cause problems on your system. Follow the instructions at your own risk. We only provide these instructions for Ubuntu 10.10 because the OpenNI sofware only has binaries for this particular Linux distribution. Installation on other varieties of Linux (or other versions of Ubuntu) has not been tested and is not supported.

Begin these instructions in an empty directory where you have write access (e.g. some empty directory in your home directory). It's best to begin with the Kinect not connected to your machine.

0. Install required packages:

sudo apt-get install g++ libglut3-dev libboost-all-dev
sudo apt-get install libwxbase2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-dev wx-common

1. Install OpenNI:

mkdir OpenNI
cd OpenNI
wget http://www.greenfoot.org/doc/kinect/OpenNI-Linux32.tar.bz2
tar -jxf OpenNI-Linux32.tar.bz2
sudo ./install.sh
cd ..

2. Install NITE:

mkdir NITE
cd NITE
wget http://www.greenfoot.org/doc/kinect/NITE-Linux32.tar.bz2
tar -jxf NITE-Linux32.tar.bz2
echo '0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=' | sudo ./install.sh
cd ..

3. Install Kinect driver:

mkdir Kinect
cd Kinect
wget http://www.greenfoot.org/doc/kinect/SensorKinect-Linux32.tar.bz2
tar -jxf SensorKinect-Linux32.tar.bz2
sudo ./install.sh
cd ..

4. Test the installation

• Plug in your Kinect.
• Check that the OpenNI software is working by running one of the example applications.

cd OpenNI/Samples/Bin/Release/
./Sample-NiUserTracker
cd ../../../../

It should show a strange fuzzy black and white view in front of the sensor. Stand in front of it, and you should get drawn in a primary colour. If you adopt the calibration pose, it should show that you are calibrating, and then it should complete calibration and start drawing a stick-man skeletal structure on you. If you can't get this to work, don't bother going any further; if you have problems calibrating, check the lighting conditions in your room, the height of the sensor, the distance from you to the sensor.

Providing the sample works, press on with installing our Kinect server software:

wget http://www.greenfoot.org/doc/kinect/kinectserver-1.2.tar.gz
tar -zxf kinectserver-1.2.tar.gz
cd kinectserver-1.2
./configure
make
sudo make install

At this point you'll have a program called kinectserver installed on your system. You can run it simply with:

kinectserver

If it runs successfully, after a few seconds you should see a little Greenfoot icon appear in your system tray (next to where your network icon is shown, and where your USB drives get shown, etc).

Note that if you run the application from a terminal, closing the terminal will kill the server! Either leave it open, or exit the server, and run it by pressing Alt+F2, then typing kinectserver into the box that pops up and pressing okay. You can now go back to the main instructions page to the section about getting the Greenfoot side going.