The recommended full desktop install of Robot Operating System (ROS) takes around 2GB of space. This is what I got when I ran sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-desktop-full:

0 upgraded, 750 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not upgraded.
Need to get 808 MB of archives.
After this operation, 2,041 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 

I selected 'No' to the following question that showed up during the install

Should the hddtemp daemon be started at boot?

If you are also interested in installing the Gazebo Simulator for ROS, please see this post: install-gazebo-ros-on-ubuntu-precise.html

Run the following scripts to setup sources, keys, install and setup the environment.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu precise 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
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
echo "source /opt/ros/hydro/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

Here is the raw version of the script above.

I ran this command to for a basic check to see if ROS was installed correctly: rospack find opencv2

If you plan to use Gazebo Simulator with ROS, please see this post

External Links

1. Click this link for detailed instructions: http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/Ubuntu