How to do it…

Once the virtual machine starts and is configured properly, we should see another window on the host system, as seen in the following screenshot:

Virtual machine

There is no difference in an ROS installation on a virtual machine. Therefore, we can simply install ROS Kinetic following the same instructions described in the previous section. We can run most of the examples and stacks that we are going to work with. Unfortunately, the virtual machine may have problems when working and interfacing with external custom hardware through ROS. Moreover, performance degradation could also be observed with ROS running in a virtual machine. It is possible that the example source code discussed in Chapter 4,  ROS Visualization and Debugging Tools, will not work.

The following screenshot shows ROS running on one of the virtual machines and the ROS installation:

ROS on virtual machine