When installing ROS I get a package can't be found despite following the right instructions

Question

I followed this link exactly: http://wiki.ros.org/melodic/Installation/Ubuntu

I started with setting up my sources.list:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Then setup my keys:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654

Then ensured my Debian package was up to date:

sudo apt update

This is all worked fine until it came to installation, any of the variants

sudo apt install ros-melodic-desktop-full

Or

sudo apt install ros-melodic-desktop

Or

sudo apt install ros-melodic-ros-base

All give me the error unable to locate package ros-melodic-desktop-full or it's variants but I don't understand why. When installing these on my other laptop I never ran into any problems and both originally run Windows and are running Ubuntu on a virtual machine.

I can confirm that this doesn't work. The repository at packages.ros.org does not contain a package ros-melodic-desktop or any of the others you mention. You can see for yourself: in /var/lib/apt/lists/ in any of the packages.ros.org_ files, there is no line that starts with Package and contains ros-melodic. There must be something wrong on the server side. — Jos, Feb 19 '20 at 14:10
@Kulfy It must be something temporary. I can't find any .deb file in any of the folders under http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu/dists/. — Jos, Feb 19 '20 at 14:20
@Jos IIRC deb files are located in pool. The package locations are generally provided in Packages file. It seems packages file for Bionic is ok but that of Eoan is incomplete. (Related: How to see all packages in a package repository? Website or command line?) — Kulfy, Feb 19 '20 at 14:32
Ah OK, I am using a company computer and so there are some restrictions, could this be why it worked on my personal laptop but not this one? — Mighty Funkster, Feb 19 '20 at 15:05

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 12 '20 at 14:37

The Packages file for Eoan doesn't have entries for the above said packages. On the other hand, those are available in that of Bionic. The packages seems to have been removed for all new releases since the Packages file for Disco also don't have information for those packages. The dependencies in newer releases can't be satisfies without breaking the operating system. This could be a reason for the removal.

Moreover even if you try to use Bionic Beaver's software sources for installing those packages in newer releases, the dependencies won't still get satisfied. If you really need to use those packages, either use Bionic Beaver or compile from source.

When installing ROS I get a package can't be found despite following the right instructions

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