All for Docker; Docker for all!

Hi! This is going to be a short post about my developments in the Week 3 of my GSoC project. Since my last post, I have had the chance to work with some exciting state-of-the-art technologies which allow easy distribution and scalability. These are -

1. Docker
2. Tango-Controls

I used the Ubuntu 14.04 Docker Container to setup my system which can be used by anyone in the world as a common platform to test the applications that I am working on. This has multiple advantages -

• Setup-time for collaborators is null. The developer sets up the Docker container and the community members can use it directly.
• Host platform-independent. It doesn’t matter whether the collaborator’s host system is Arch Linux, Windows 8, or a specific version of Ubuntu. Docker uses Linux namespaces and ensures a separation of concerns.
• Revision control mechanism. The developer plays around with a Docker Image just as he/she would do with any other Distribution Revision Control system. I push my changes to the repository (Docker image) and my mentors can simply pull the updates to get the new system configuration.

So far, I have setup Tango-Controls, ROS Indigo, and the Husky libraries for my Docker image. These can be found in the Docker Registry Hub

The issues that I am currently facing are -

• Graphics Problems. X-server Bad Drawing errors. A way to get around this will be to better understand how ROS applications use the X-server and then provide Docker the appropriate graphics capabilities. But this does not impede with the Command Line applications of ROS and Tango which I have been working on.
• MySQL connection problems. The workaround currently is to use the Host OS’s Tango HOST. I observed that it works fine that way.

This is it for this post. I mainly discussed about Docker in this post, which was an important thing that we discussed in the All-hands meeting on 8th June. I’ll go into much more detail with Tango Controls in the upcoming blog posts and the biweekly reports.

Ciao!