If you are going to use a virtual machine, there is one ready for download that already has ROS and Gazebo installed.

Instructions can be found here.

The actual download can be found here.

Download the 64 bit version of you have enough RAM.

Below are the instructions for installing the turtlebot and gazebo on a 14.04 flavor of Ubuntu with ROS Indigo. This combination seems to have the most support and is relatively stable. Don't miss the 'pyqt4-dev-tools', several others have.

The instructions also assume that you are using a catkin workspace, which you definitely should get familiar with (see these tutorials). Tutorials 1-3 are very useful for the time being; don't worry about Tutorial 4.

The procedure below only includes dependencies that are not immediately apparent from compiler error messages. You will likely need to install others packages/dependencies, but should be able to figure out what they are from the messages. Here goes:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list' 

wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add - 

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-gazebo7-ros-pkgs pyqt4-dev-tools

cd {your catkin workspace}/src

git clone https://github.com/turtlebot/turtlebot_simulator.git -b indigo

git clone https://github.gatech.edu/ivabots/kobuki_desktop.git -b indigo

cd ..

catkin_make

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