Getting SimpleOpenNI working in Processing on Ubuntu 13.10

There's still obviously not a great, reliable installation path for SimpleOpenNI. But this is what worked for me (it got me to the point of the DepthImage example sketch working).

I visited the simple-openni installation page and followed its extra Linux instructions:

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://simple-openni.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SimpleOpenNI-2.0/platform/linux/installLinuxRules.sh
wget https://simple-openni.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SimpleOpenNI-2.0/platform/linux/primesense-usb.rules
sudo ./installLinuxRules.sh

This has the effect of copying the included .rules file to /etc/udev/rules.d/557-primesense-usb.rules.

Then I downloaded Processing 2.0.3 for 64-bit Linux. I followed the previous instructions in Processing to install SimpleOpenNI through the Add Library process. It took me two tries - the first time, it timed out and died because of some SSL error.

Then, I tried to run the included Contributed Libraries -> SimpleOpenNI -> OpenNI -> DepthImage example sketch (from the File -> Examples... menu).

As I documented in the comments here, I encountered an error about a missing libboost so, and fixed this by installing libboost 1.54:

sudo apt-get install libboost1.54-dev

Then, I symlinked the installed libbost_system.so.1.53.0 file into the SimpleOpenNI linux64 directory as 1.54.0 (reckless, but it appears to work):

cd ~/sketchbook/libraries/SimpleOpenNI/library/linux64/
ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libboost_system.so.1.53.0 libboost_system.so.1.54.0

Now, when I tried to run the DepthImage example, I got an error saying "what() Cannot open Kinect", which I resolved (after seeing this thread) by hunting down another rules file, 51-kinect.rules, from the libfreenect project, and placing it into /etc/udev/rules.d/:

wget https://raw.github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect/master/platform/linux/udev/51-kinect.rules
sudo cp 51-kinect.rules /etc/udev/rules.d/

Now, my DepthImage example works fine.