EDIT: please also consider reading the update.

Due to the split between Gazebo and ROS, the installation of both components has been a nightmare during the summer, and even during the fall. The teams did a great job and it is now possible to install Gazebo and ROS from the debs, without working on some kind of nightly build.

So here is how to proceed for Ubuntu 13.04, as of today (check post date). This post is a sum-up of the main steps. Please post a comment if this does not work for you. I did not write this post from a clean install, so I may have skipped one step. Be sure to have a clean catkin folder.

Step 1: install ROS

Basically follow the official ROS Hydro install tutorial:

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sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu raring main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-desktop-full

You can also source your environment set-up script for each terminal by appending the following line to your .bashrc file:

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source /opt/ros/hydro/setup.bash

No big deal here.

Step 2: read the Gazebo/ROS install note

Read this page carefully. Only the ROS repo is required. The OSR repo is NOT required. This will install Gazebo 1.9.x.

So Gazebo should in fact already be there, which you can check by running a gazebo command.

Step 3: install gazebo_ros

This is done with the following command:

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sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-hydro-gazebo-ros-control

And that’s it.

The Gazebo install tutorial is somehow unclear for ROS users. The most important step is to read the Gazebo and ROS notice that has been added recently.