Progress has been slow as my laptop is having overheating problems, so running ROS for any extended periods was getting difficult. For this reason I have almost finished setting up a Linux development environment on my main PC which is more than capable of running ROS and all the graphical tools. I will keep using the laptop for less intensive tasks and for development away from home.

I am using Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa 64-bit on the PC vs Linux Mint 17 Qiana 32-bit on the laptop (laptop had Wi-Fi driver issues with 64-bit version), but still sticking with ROS Indigo instead of upgrading to the more recent Jade, to avoid any surprises.

Installation of ROS was straightforward as with the laptop, and follows the Ubuntu installation instructions, as Mint is built on Ubuntu. The only edit I had to make was change the repository name to use the Ubuntu Trusty codename instead of the Mint Qiana codename, so the repository name looks like this:

deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu trusty main

I use Dropbox to keep everything in sync and share the same catkin workspace between the two machines. The only minor annoyance is having to delete the build and devel folders and rebuilding my packages when switching between machines, because of the 32-bit/64-bit difference.