Install things on Pepper

How would I install things on Pepper, since I don't know what package manager it uses. I usually use apt on my Ubuntu machine and want to install some packages on Pepper. I'm not sure what package manager Pepper has (if any) and want to install some packages, but also only know the name of the package using apt (not sure if the package name is the same on other package managers). And if possible, would I be able to install apt on Pepper. Thanks.

Note: From the research I've done, Pepper is using NaoQi which is based off Gentoo which uses portage.

You don't have root access on Pepper, which limits what you can install (and apt isn't on the robot anyway).

Some possibilities:

• Include your content in Choregraphe projects - when you install a package, the whole directory structure is installed (more exactly, what's listed in the .pml); so you can put arbitrary files on your robot, and you can usually include whatever dependencies your code needs.
• Install python packages with pip.

In NAOqi 2.5, a slightly older version of pip is installed that will not always work out of the box; I recommend upgrading it:

pip install --user --upgrade pip

... you can then use the upgraded pip to install other packages, using the upgraded pip, and always --user:

/home/nao/.local/bin/pip install --user whatever-package-you-need

Note however that if you do this and use your packages in your code running on Pepper, that code won't work on other robots until you do pip on them, which is why I usually only do this for tests; for production code I prefer packaging all dependencies in my app's package.

As a workaround if you need to install software (or just newer versions of software) using Gentoo Prefix is an option.

Gentoo Prefix builds a Gentoo OS on any location (no need of root, can be any folder). It includes it's own portage (package manager) to install new software.

I maintain a few projects to work with Pepper and use "any" software I want. Note that they are built for 64b (amd64) and 32b (x86) even though for Pepper only the 32b matter.

• gentoo_prefix_ci and gentoo_prefix_ci_32b Which builds nightly the bootstrap of the Gentoo Prefix system. This is a process that takes a while to compile (3-6h depending on your machine) and that breaks from time to time (as upstream packages are updated and bugs are found, Gentoo is a rolling release distribution). Every night updated binary images ready to use can be found in the Releases section.
• For ROS users that want to run it on the robot, based on the previous work, I maintain also ros_overlay_on_gentoo_prefix and ros_overlay_on_gentoo_prefix_32b. They provide nightly builds with binary releases of ROS Kinetic and ROS Melodic over Gentoo Prefix using ros-overlay. You can find ready-to-use 'ros_base' and 'desktop' releases.
• For purposes related to the RoboCup@Home Social Standard Platform League where the Pepper robot is used I also maintain a specific build that contains a lot of additional software. This project is called pepper_os and it builds 270+ ROS packages, a lot of Python packages (250+ including Theano, dlib, Tensorflow, numpy...) and all the necessary dependencies for these to build (750+ packages). Note that the base image (it's built with Docker) is the actual Pepper 2.5.5.5 image, so it can be used for debugging as it if it was in the real robot (although without sensors and such).

Maybe this approach, or these projects, are useful.